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In a rare public talk via the Web, fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden urged a tech conference
audience Monday to help "fix" the U.S. government's surveillance of its citizens.
He spoke via teleconference from Russia to an audience of thousands at the South by Southwest
Interactive Festival in Austin. The event marked the first time the former National
Security Agency contractor has directly addressed people in the United States since he fled
the country with thousands of secret documents last June.
In response to a question, Snowden said he had no regrets about his decision to leak
the NSA documents, which showed the intelligence agency has conducted secret monitoring of
Americans' phone and Internet behavior in the name of national security.
"Would I do it again? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we
had a right to," he said. "I took an oath to support and defend the
Constitution. And I saw the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale," he added,
to applause from the 3,000 people in the auditorium at the Austin Convention Center.
"South by Southwest and the tech community, the people in the room in Austin, they're
the folks who can fix this," Snowden said earlier. "There's a political response that
needs to occur, but there's also a tech response that needs to occur."
He appeared on video screens with a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a backdrop. The live
stream was slow, repeatedly freezing Snowden's image onscreen.
The pair of American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who hosted the discussion said Snowden's
video, ultimately delivered via Google Hangouts, was streamed through several routers for security.
Snowden also said Internet users need more awareness, and better tools, to help them
secure their online information from prying eyes.
While tech geeks may have no problem using encryption tools to scramble their messages
or accessing the more-private "deep Web" via clients like Tor, Snowden said the average
Web user should be able to access similar protections.
"This is something that people have to be able to interact with, and the way we interact
with it now is not that good," he said. Snowden took questions from two moderators
-- the ACLU's Chris Sogohian and Ben Wizner, his legal counsel -- from the audience, and
from Twitter. The first, fittingly, came from Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide
Web 25 years ago this week. Berners-Lee asked Snowden what he would change about the nation's
surveillance system. "We need public oversight ... some way for
trusted public figures to advocate for us. We need a watchdog that watches Congress,
because if we're not informed, we can't consent to these (government) policies."
Asked about the difference between government surveillance and snooping by private Internet
companies, Snowden said he considers government surveillance more insidious because "the government
has the ability to deprive you of rights. They can jail you."