The new anti-surveillance technologies recently called for by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is much needed to ensure individuals’ privacy and protection from government, Yan Zhu, a San-Francisco based staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, told RIA-Novosti Tuesday.
“This is good and much needed right now. This is extremely important. In an age where government agencies have the ability to spy on virtually any communications, people need to be able to defend themselves,” Zhu said.
On Saturday, Snowden addressed the participants of the New York conference Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) via a video link from Moscow and urged them “to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day.”
The technologies Snowden mentioned are actively being worked on already, Zhu said, and are likely to get a new spin in the next few years. Some of such anti-surveillance projects include Tor, software and an open network that protects from traffic analysis, and Mailpile, an electronic mail service with special encryption and privacy features.
Zhu, who is part of Tor, also works on browser security and privacy extensions HTTPS Everywhere, which forces encrypted connections to websites, and Privacy Badger, which blocks invisible third-party trackers on the web. She said new technologies would most likely require the user to download new software, but large Internet companies may start to incorporate them by default into their products.
Such product will not only help protect personal data but allow to keep people working with secret information safe.
[Source: en.ria.ru,23/07/2014]