Edward Snowden made an impassioned call on Saturday for hackers and technologists to help would-be whistleblowers spill more government secrets.
Speaking via remote Google Hangouts video feed from Russia, Snowden addressed his comments to an audience at this weekend’s Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York.
Arguing that “technology empowers dissent” as well as “democracy,” Snowden said that the only way to enable whistleblowers is to give them better tools to pass secrets to journalists, protecting their communications, their identities and preventing them from going to jail for it.
To do that, Snowden said, he needed the help of the hackers, coders and developers gathered in the crowded rooms of the conference, as well as the ones watching via live stream online.
"We the people, you the people, you in this room right now have both the means and capabilities to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols upon which we rely everyday," he said during a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg, who himself became a whistleblower when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.
