Via Mark Sletten comes this thread from yesterday's Ask Me Anything session at Reddit that featured Edward Snowden, Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The question posed to Snowden:

What's the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?

His answer is well worth reading in full (I've posted it after the jump), but its essence is a full-throated defense of classical liberal and libertarian theorizing not just about the consent of the governed but the right to work around the government when it focuses on social order over legitimacy. And, as important, a recognition that this is what we at Reason and others call "the Libertarian Moment," or a technologically empowered drive toward greater and greater control over more and more aspects of our lives. While the Libertarian Moment is enabled by technological innovations and generally increasing levels of wealth and education, it ultimately proceeds from a mind-set as much as anything else: We have the right to live peacefully any way we choose as long as we are not infringing on other people's rights to do the same. Our politics and our laws should reflect this emphasis on pluralism, tolerance, and persuasion (as opposed to coercion) across social, economic, and intellectual spheres of activity.

As Snowden emphasizes, it's not simply that governments (thankfully) fail at attempts for perfect surveillance and law enforcement. It's that technologically empowered people are actively working to route around government attempts to fence us in. "We the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights," he writes (emphasis in original). "we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis."

Reading throught the Reddit exchange, it's easy to see why Snowden recently brought the 1,000-plus attendees of the International Students for Liberty Conference to their feet multiple times. He isn's some kind of pie-eyed nihilist, hell-bent on destroying the red, white, and blue for personal fame or out of ideological fervor. At 31 years old, he is an exceptionally well-spoken, thoughtful critic of the abuse of power that has become endemic to modern American governance. At the ISFLC, he said his one regret is that he didn't expose systemic infringement on citizens' constitutional rights sooner than he did.

If people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures. How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights. You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where—if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen—we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis. Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Emphasis in original.

Snowden ends by noting that "when [the law] becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends."

Here's his full answer: