The NSA whistleblower has criticised the focus on encryption as being a good start, but not going far enough in helping users

Edward Snowden will dedicate his time to developing and promoting technologies aimed at protect users' rights by design, he announced at the Hope conference in New York city.

Speaking on Saturday night, Snowden argued that encryption is an "important first step" in protecting those rights, but doesn't go far enough.

“It doesn’t end at encryption, it starts at encryption,” he said, highlighting the issue of metadata as one example where encryption fails. “Encryption protects the content but we forget about associations.

"These programs like [the Patriot Act's] section 215, and mass surveillance in general, is not about surveilling you, it’s not about surveilling me. It’s about surveilling us collectively. It’s about watching the company. For everybody in the country and on a global scale."

Snowden implored developers to spend more time and effort focusing on helping users maintain their privacy.

"You in this room, right now have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day," he told the conference, speaking by video link from Moscow, where he has been living in exile since 2013.

"That is what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in."

He reserved much of his criticism for software which, while technically strong, offers a poor user experience. He described GPG, a set of tools for public key encryption, as "robust and pretty reliable encryption. Unfortunately it’s damn near unusable."

Snowden has already begun promoting technology that lets users act to protect their own rights. Speaking to the Guardian on Saturday, he recommended SpiderOak, an end-to-end encrypted filesharing system, as a replacement to software such as DropBox.

At the Hope conference, Snowden specifically highlighted the need to beat surveillance techniques such as traffic analysis as an area for development, as well as mixed routing, which protects individual connections from oversight.

"We need to have protocols that are resistant to traffic analysis. They need to be padded, basically, even if there’s some level of performance penalty. So you can’t look at differences in for example Skype conversations and tell which phoneme or word was spoken based on packet size and signaling speed and so on and so forth," he said.

"You also need to use some sort of mixed routing, some sort of shared infrastructure, that divorces the individual connection from the individual orgination point. And that’s still a hard problem. We haven’t solved that in a performance respecting manner.”

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