Forget Obama at SxSW, Listen to Edward Snowden on Encryption
President Barack Obama ventured to Austin, Texas on Friday to deliver the opening keynote for the SxSW conference where he asked the tech industry to help solve Washington's problems. Yet when it came to the hottest debate in tech—the battle between Apple and the FBI— the President declined to comment specifically on the case.
"On the broader issue of privacy rights, Obama, who trained as a constitutional lawyer, said he tended to lean more on protecting civil liberties but said U.S. citizens need to be prepared to make concessions on their privacy for the sake of security, the way they endure airport screenings or DUI checkpoints. 'This notion that somehow data is different and can be walled off from those other trade-offs we make, I believe, is incorrect,' he said."
If you need a palate cleanser after reading that, I suggest you watch Nick Gillespie's interview with Edward Snowden at the Free State Project's Liberty Forum in New Hampshire. In the wide-ranging talk, Snowden address the Apple case and talks about the NSA and how government can win back the trust of the American people.
