Snowden responded with what turned out to be the theme of the conference: "The key thing is that technology empowers dissent." He noted that from Ellsberg's Xerox machine to the power of high tech and the Internet, technology has " fundamentally changed the way we relate to government and the way government relates to us." The vigor and viciousness of the government pursuit of whistleblowers reflects that those in charge, "fear us" for our potential to reveal the truth and fear technology as the enabling mechanism.
Snowden cautioned the audience not to "sleepwalk into new applications" that serve those in government with so much to hide. This will guarantee both a "dystopian future" and a world in which government technology enables them to "know everything about us."
Snowden offered a devastating answer to those who accused him and others of working against the interests of the United States:
"The founding fathers didn't have a revolution to enshrine internal bureaucracies. If we're going to have democracy, we have to know what's going on. ... We can't have the government that shuts us out. Tom Drake showed me how to do the right thing."
Snowden summed up his philosophy in a few critical words:
"If you let up on your rights for a moment, you've lost them for a lifetime."
Through greed and connivance, the government created a class of younger people who are essentially "indentured servants." according to Snowden. The use of massive, invasive, ubiquitous spying keeps the servants in line. The simplicity and truth of this argument was devastating.
There was much more shared during this extraordinary presentation by the first and the latest high-impact persecuted and prosecuted patriotic whistleblowers. Both Snowden and Ellsberg encouraged others to step forward. They offered a message of true hope for a peaceful, patriotic, and productive shift away from highly negative government policies. Instead of "a few guys behind closed doors" making self serving and often disastrous policies, Snowden argued that we need as much transparency as possible to allow the people to make their own choices for a positive future.
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Hackers on Planet Earth X (Hope X) Conference
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