The Internet Security Illusion
Snowden’s latest video chat offers two key lessons for policymakers
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Call Edward Snowden what you will: traitor, hero, or simply a naive young man. Maybe he’s all three. At the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference, he was both subject and object, clarifying some of the defining public-policy challenges of the digital age even as he illustrated the difficulty of resolving them.
Snowden, a fugitive who began leaking documents about the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations last year, spoke via video feed before a large and largely sympathetic crowd in Austin, Tex. He exhorted technology companies to better protect their users, called for more oversight of the NSA, and inveighed against bulk surveillance.