Apple Co-founder: “Snowden Is A Hero To Me”

Hot on the heels of the apparent defeat of the extension of The Patriot Act, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak reaffirmed his support for digital privacy in an interview over the weekend with Arabian Business.com.

When we start to talk about privacy and I ask him whether he thinks NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a hero or a villain his answer is prompt and unabashed. 

“Total hero to me; total hero,” he gushes. “Not necessarily [for] what he exposed, but the fact that he internally came from his own heart, his own belief in the United States Constitution, what democracy and freedom was about. And now a federal judge has said that NSA data collection was unconstitutional.”

Snowden, who revealed classified NSA documents to reporters in 2013, is a fugitive from US prosecutors, living on a temporary visa in Russia, another nation he has criticised for its approach to privacy. The judgement Wozniak refers to is that of a federal court in New York, which earlier this month found Section 215 of the US Patriot Act, which authorised the mass surveillance programmes exposed by Snowden, to be insufficient grounds for justifying the NSA’s collection of domestic communications data.

“So he’s a hero to me, because he gave up his own life to do it,” says Wozniak. “And he was a young person, to give up his life. But he did it for reasons of trying to help the rest of us and not just mess up a company he didn’t like.”

As stories emerge worldwide of implanted spyware in commercially available hard disks and in SIM cards sold to international telecoms companies, security specialists have incessantly offered solutions to the general public, as to how to shield private activities and data from prying eyes. Wozniak, however, is pessimistic about the prospects of protection, and believes the root cause of the problem extends back to the early years of OS development.

“It’s almost impossible [to protect yourself] because today’s operating systems generally get so huge that they can only come from a few sources, like Microsoft, Google and Apple,” he says. “And those operating systems have so many millions of lines of code in them, built by tens of thousands of engineers over time, that it’s so difficult to go back and detect anything in it that’s spying on you. It’s like having a house with 50,000 doors and windows and you have no idea where there might be a tiny little camera.”

Woz is an ardent privacy advocate and bemoans the lost chances of computing’s fledgling years, where he feels it may have been possible to block future attempts at monitoring.

“There is a type of technology that you can fairly securely today run on your computer and someone else’s computer, [which allows you to] send them a message and it’s private the way it should be,” he says. “I believe that I should be allowed to send a message to my wife and nobody can know it unless they know our passwords.

In 1991, a system named PGP [Pretty Good Privacy] emerged for secure point-to-point data transfer. The data to be sent was encrypted on the machine that sent it and decrypted on the destination machine. Wozniak decries the technology as a lost opportunity for OS vendors.

“At that point in time, if Apple and Microsoft had built [PGP] into their operating system, it would have been a permanent part of email and all email would have been secure,” he says. “Now we’re talking about making laws that you cannot use encryption. It’s almost like you can’t have any secrets anymore. And the modern generation just accepts this as the status quo.

“Companies like Google and Facebook are trying to make money off knowing things about you; they’re trying to funnel things to you and make money that way. Apple is only making good products that you can choose to buy if you want, so I look at Apple as being more the protector of privacy than anyone else.“

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Finally, Wozniak unleashes some other brutal truths…

“Everything is first-class [in Dubai]… The United States used to talk, when I was growing up, like that’s what we were. The US would look like this if we didn’t spend all our money on the military.“