Edward Snowden talks permanence, privacy, and progress

Edward Snowden speaks via videoconference with EPFL's Marcel Salathé at EPFL's AMLD conference © samueldevantery.com - On Monday, January 27th, cybersecurity expert and whistleblower Edward Snowden drew a standing ovation from a packed auditorium at the SwissTech Convention Center on the EPFL campus, where he delivered a keynote address via videoconference as part of the fourth Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD). The former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and National Security Agency (NSA) consultant Edward Snowden spoke from Moscow, where he is seeking asylum from the US government following his divulgence of classified information about the NSA's use of mass surveillance in 2013. Though the title of his talk was "Surveillance in the age of AI", his moving discourse addressed freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy in addition to online privacy. A data collection problem Snowden began with an excerpt from his memoir, Permanent Record (Metropolitan Books, 2019), describing the explosion of data collection and "surveillance capitalism" that upended the "pioneering spirit" of the early internet, ultimately driving him to come forward. He argued that today, legal instruments like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are largely toothless, giving examples of how companies like Facebook are circumventing them without penalty. "The problem with the GDPR is in the name: we don't have a data protection problem, but a data collection problem.