NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke at the South by Southwest conference Monday. Today, NBC News reports: “Snowden: Feinstein a Hypocrite for Blasting CIA Spying.”

PRATAP CHATTERJEE, pchatterjee at igc.org, @pchatterjee
Executive director of CorpWatch, Chatterjee said today: “Globalization and the Internet have connected us where an immense amount of information is accessible at the tap of a finger. Edward Snowden has revealed that the U.S. government has paid off the software developers and data providers to put trapdoors and secret passages into this connected world. He has spilled the secrets on how the Obama administration is using bounty hunters to hack into our lives and stalk us every day.

“It is time for the technologists and ordinary citizens to fight back against Big Brother, and reclaim our privacy. As Snowden told SXSW in Austin, the National Security Agency has ‘set fire to the future of the Internet.’ He is absolutely right to say: ‘We need security by default. We need public oversight. We need a watchdog that watches Congress.'”

Chatterjee has written the pieces “Selling Your Secrets: The Invisible World of Software Backdoors and Bounty Hunters” and “The Data Hackers: Mining Your Information for Big Brother.”