Build internet for users not government surveillance, Snowden tells IEFT

'People are being killed based on metadata' whistleblower says

The internet should primarily be designed for the benefit of its users, not governments and corporations who wish to use it to spy on individuals.

That was the call from government surveillance whilstleblower Edward Snowden who was speaking via video link from Russia to an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.

The IETF describes itself as "a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet".

The event followed a screening of Citizenfour, the documentary which details how Snowden exposed NSA surveillance.

According to The Register, Snowden rhetorically asked: "Who is the internet for, who does it serve, who is the IETF's ultimate customer?" The answer, he said, is everyday users, rather than government or business.

However, Snowden warned that the current protocols surrounding the internet aren't operating in a way that makes this possible, because the internet is leaking too much data about users.

"We need to divorce identity from persona in a lasting way," said Snowden, who described how something as simple as credit card use generates enough information to identify and locate an individual.

"If it's creating more metadata, this is in general a bad thing," he said, warning that government agencies are using this information in a variety of detrimental ways.

"People are being killed based on metadata," Snowden argued.

The answer, according to Snowden, is for encryption, rather than surveillance to be the normal attitude when it comes to the world wide web.

Last month, while speaking via webcast at a live Q&A session hosted by Amnesty International UK, Snowden accused the British government of trying to limit its own citizens' civil liberties by secretly passing legislation that allows GCHQ to "hack anybody's computer".

"Recently there was a draft change of law suggested in the UK on something called the equipment interference code, which is a euphemism for hacking: this is talking about computer hacking," he said.