Ed Snowden was interviewed today as part of the New Yorker festival. This TechCruch report says Snowden "was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy. His first answer called for a reform of government policies." He went on to add some remarks about Dropbox, Google, Facebook and encryption, and that's what the report chose to focus on. The TechCrunch headline: "Snowden's Privacy Tips".
Mainstream and even technology media reportage does Snowden a terrible disservice.
I've listened to the interview. After being asked by a listener what they should do about privacy, Snowden gave a careful, nuanced, and comprehensive answer over five minutes. His very first line was 'this is an incredibly complex topic' and he did well to stick to plain language throughout. He canvassed a great many issues including: the need for policy reform, the 'Nothing to Hide' argument, the inversion of civil rights when governments ask us to justify the right to be left alone, the collusion of companies and governments, the poor state of product security and usability, the chilling effect on industry of government intervention in security, metadata, and the radicalization of computer scientists today being comparable with physicists in the Cold War.
Only after all that, and a follow up question about 'ordinary people', did Snowden say 'don't use Dropbox'.
Consistently, when Snowden is asked what to do about privacy, his answers are primarily about politics not technology. When pressed, he dispenses the odd advice about using Tor and disk encryption, but Snowden's chief concerns (as I have discussed in depth previously) are around accountability, government transparency, better cryptology research, better security product quality, and so on. He is no hacker in the conventional us-versus-them mould.
I am simply dismayed how Snowden's sophisticated analyses are dumbed down to security tips. He has never been a cyber Agony Aunt. The proper response to NSA overreach has to be agitation for regime change, not do-it-yourself cryptography. That is Snowden's message.
