Snowden speak: the exiled whistlebloweron Apple's privacy fight, the presidential election, and whether he's ever coming home.

AuthorGillespie, Nick
PositionInterview

NATIONAL SECURITY WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden remains in exile in Russia, but on February 20, the former federal contractor who exposed government incursions on privacy spoke with reason's Nick Gillespie via a secure satellite link at Liberty Forum, a gathering of the Free State Project in Manchester, New Hampshire. For video of the interview, go to reason.com.

reason: Let's talk about Apple being requested by court order to unlock the cellphone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. You recently tweeted, "This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means Google picked a side, but it's not the public's."

Can you elaborate on that? Is Apple really on the public's side? And how does strong encryption of personal communication, even when utilized by terrorists, strengthen freedom and liberty?

Edward Snowden: This is an incredibly complex topic. First off, Google did come forward. Their CEO made some comments in the defense of the ability of private enterprises not to be constricted by government but to do softer work at their direction rather than at the direction of their customers. Now, it was very tentative. But hey, it's a start.

Is Apple the big champion of liberty and individual rights? It's not really about that. We're not looking for the perfect heroes here, right? Don't love the actor, love the act. In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings--which are of course legitimate crimes, this is an act of terrorism as it's been described--Apple said, "All right, we've got this private product out there that's designed to protect the security of all customers, not a particular individual customer. But it's a binary choice. Either all of us have security or none of us have security."

So the FBI went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, but we want you to strip out some essential protections that you built into this program so we can attack the program in a certain way." This is deeply disturbing to me, because I know that we've had laboratory techniques since the 1990s that allow the FBI and other organizations that have incredible resources to unilaterally mount hardware attacks on security devices to reengineer their software without compelling private actors, private enterprises, private individuals to work contrary to their will.

There are important court precedents that have equated code to speech. It's an act of creation, an act of expression, when you program something. If the government can show up at any time, at any house, at any individual, and say, "Regardless of your intention, regardless of your idea, regardless of your plan, you don't work for you, you work for us," that's a radically different thing.

Whether it's Apple or Google or anybody else who at least challenges that assertion of authority and allows us to litigate it, this is critical. Because prior to this moment, these things were being litigated in secret in front of a secret court, a foreign intelligence surveillance [FISA] court. In 33 years, FISA courts were asked by the government 33,900 times to authorize surveillance or reinterpretations of statutory law that are more favorable to the government, that we never knew about because all of these decisions are classified. The government got a "no" from this court only 11 times.

reason: Is any communication really secure anymore?

Snowden: There are different kinds of surveillance. There's mass surveillance, which is typically done on communications in transit, as they cross the Internet over lines that you don't own, but you don't have a choice not to use because of the nature of the modern communications grid. You can't say "I want my communications to only route this network." Once they leave your home, once they leave your handset or your cellphone or whatever device you're using, it's out of your control and it gets routed invisibly across borders, across systems, across enterprises.

The...

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