Edward Snowden has announced plans to work on anti-surveillance technology, kind of. (Via Getty Images)
Speaking to attendees at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference —including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg— via Google Hangouts, Snowden made this call to arms to build a better future.
“By encoding our rights into the programs and protocols upon which we rely every day. And that's what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in and I hope that you will join me.” (Via Hackers on Planet Earth)
Snowden doesn't really mention what exactly he'll be working on or when he's starting work on it, but the subsequent headlines were a little more clear-cut.
Tech sites like Re/code and ZDNet ran headlines saying Snowden will be working on anti-surveillance technology, which seemed more or less what he was hinting at but didn't say explicitly.
He made a similar appearance at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March and issued a similar call to action, asking the tech community to get involved in fighting government overreach. (Via ACLU)
Snowden has been particularly active in the media over the last couple months, doing high-profile interviews with NBC and recently with The Guardian where he also talked about using technology to preserve privacy.
"Technology can actually increase privacy, but not if we sleepwalk into new applications of it." (Via The Guardian)
Also in that interview with The Guardian was this press-ready tidbit that got picked up Monday.
"Snowden says nude photos were frequently passed around via email." (Via MSNBC)
Naturally, it didn't take long for that fact to make headlines in major publications like The New York Times, despite only being a small piece of what the Times itself refers to as a "wide-ranging interview."
Snowden recently applied for extension of his year-long asylum in Russia which started on August 1 of last year.
