Free countries should not pass laws that limit liberties because they are afraid of terrorist threats, warned U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden on Wednesday during a live web chat.

In a sobering online talk sponsored by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression at Ryerson University, Snowden spoke briefly about Ottawa’s controversial new anti-terror law, Bill C-51, and the erosion of public rights.

The former National Security Agency employee said only Canadians can decide on whether C-51 is a good or bad bill, but “Canadian intelligence has one of the weakest oversight frameworks out of any western intelligence agency.”

In Canada, terrorism kills fewer people than lightning strikes and it is extraordinarily rare, Snowden said.

“No matter what we do, no matter what laws we pass, we cannot throw away all of our rights, all of our liberties, all of our traditional freedoms because we are afraid of rare instances of criminal activity,” he said.

Nearly two years ago Snowden leaked documents to journalists exposing the U.S. government’s covert monitoring activities. Labelled a criminal by U.S. authorities and a hero by others, he has been living in hiding, first in Hong Kong and now in Russia, ever since.

Snowden said he would love to come back to the U.S. and face a fair trial, but there is “no fair trial available” to him at the moment.

The CJFE have sponsored a living archive of 400 of the leaked Snowden documents, in conjunction with the University of Toronto, all publicly available online.

Snowden’s talk came as Ottawa continues to debate the Conservative government’s proposed terror laws, which would drastically increase the mandate of Canada’s spies.

Snowden referred to C-51 as being just like the U.S. Patriot Act, the law passed following the 9-11 terrorist attacks to bolster the powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Under Bill C-51, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service would gain police-like powers to “disrupt” threats to Canada — including, but not limited to, terrorist threats.

The bill has been criticized by opposition parties, as well as a number of legal and security experts, for giving CSIS a wide array of new powers but failing to provide increase oversight for their application.

Snowden said he does not think mass surveillance is effective in catching lone wolf terrorist attackers.

“When you think about bulk collection . . . and you collect everything on everybody, you don’t really understand anything about it,” he said. “You can drown in data. You can’t make the connections and more data is constantly generated all the time.”

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are completely innocent, he added.

“Governments never had this power in the past where they could pre-emptively investigate every member of society, place them under quite intrusive surveillance,” he said, adding the British have a program called Optic Nerve that allows them to capture images from webcams.

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Fundamentally, the freedoms and liberties people enjoy are being changed without their consent, Snowden added.

And at times sounding vulnerable, Snowden said he no longer feels comfortable using any form of electronic information and cautioned neither should anyone else.

“Everything can be subverted,” he said during the hour-long chat.

When asked by a high school student if it was worth it to pursue university studies in computer security research, Snowden said that by the time you graduate, what you are taught will be out of date.

“The only way you can keep up in this field is to learn by doing,” he said.

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