Edward Snowden joined Google, Reddit, Mozilla and a host of other tech firms and privacy groups Thursday to call for a strengthening of privacy rights online.

The Reset the Net campaign was launched June 5, a year after Snowden’s revelations about the scale of the US government’s surveillance programs were first published in the Guardian and the Washington Post.



“One year ago, we learned that the internet is under surveillance, and our activities are being monitored to create permanent records of our private lives – no matter how innocent or ordinary those lives might be,” Snowden said in a statement released by his attorney.

“Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the US Congress fails to do the same."

Snowden said adopting encryption was “the first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance … don’t ask for your privacy. Take it back.”

"It's been a year since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the US government's abusive spying programs. In that time Congress and the Obama Administration have failed to protect our rights," said Tiffiniy Cheng, spokesperson for Fight for the Future, which co-ordinated the campaign.

"Now, they've got a rebellion on their hands as tech companies and internet users work together to directly intervene in mass surveillance and block the NSA and its kind from the web."



Speaking via satellite at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) conference in New York on Thursday, Snowden said mass global surveillance “isn’t just an American problem, this is a global problem.”

He said US government’s creation of “backdoors” into tech companies created openings for other countries to use and made us all less safe.



He was interviewed by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I’m afraid we’ve descended to this point,” said Barlow. “But why do animals lick their genitals? Because they can. Why do governments do this? Because they can’t lick their own.”



“They’re licking ours, and taking pictures,” Snowden replied.

Barlow also announced the launch of the Courage Foundation, a fund dedicated to supporting Snowden’s legal battles.



The announcement was one of a series timed to coincide with Reset the Net.



Google announced its support for the campaign earlier this week and also published the source code for an “end-to-end” encryption service for its Chrome browser. The company has asked developers to help it work on the project, which it hopes will offer a simple way for people to encrypt their communications and other data online.



On Thursday Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, also threw its support behind the campaign. Dave Steer, director of advocacy at the Mozilla Foundation, said in a blogpost that despite all the publicity surrounding the Snowden revelations “the public policy landscape itself has changed very little and the threats to privacy and security are just as strong.”



The company announced it was setting up a research project, Cyber Security Delphi, with industry, academic and policy experts to better assess ways of improving security and privacy online.



Tumblr, the blogging site owned by Yahoo, announced it would be adding secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption by default for the readers of its 189m blogs.

The Guardian chose Reset the Net day to launch SecureDrop, a platform that allows people to anonymously submit documents and data.