Edward Snowden has warned that today's surveillance technology is so advanced and intrusive that it makes what he exposed in 2013 by US and British intelligence services appear like “child's play”.
On the 10th anniversary of his revelations about the extent of surveillance — some of it unlawful — by the US National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ, he said he had no regrets and underlined constructive advances, reports The Guardian.
However, he is concerned about invasions of privacy in both the physical and digital worlds. "Technology has grown to be enormously influential," stated Snowden. “If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today, 2013 seems like child’s play.”
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Snowden was concerned not only about the risks presented by governments and Big Tech, but also by commercially accessible video surveillance cameras, face recognition, artificial intelligence, and intrusive malware like Pegasus, which was used against dissidents and journalists, said the report.
“We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power,” he said looking back to 2013.
Snowden has been in exile in Russia since 2013, after fleeing Hong Kong, where he gave media access to tens of thousands of classified papers to journalists.
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His critics criticize him for being in Russia, despite the fact that it looks to be his only realistic alternative other than jail time in the United States. Since the invasion of Ukraine and his obtaining of Russian citizenship last year, two years after applying, criticism has grown, it also said.
End-to-end encryption “was a pipe dream in 2013 when the story broke”, Snowden said. “An enormous fraction of global internet traffic traveled electronically naked. Now, it is a rare sight.”
“The idea that after the revelations in 2013 there would be rainbows and unicorns the next day is not realistic. It is an ongoing process. And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives and beyond,” he also said.
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The US intelligence agencies and the UK admit that the debate over privacy that Snowden sparked was beneficial, but they say that this was offset by the harm done to their capabilities, particularly the closure of MI6's human-intelligence activities.
Their third criticism is that in 2013, the narrative depicted the NSA and GCHQ as the only bad actors, disregarding what Russia and China were doing on the internet.