Edward Snowden, remotely rocking SXSW

AUSTIN, Texas — Edward Snowden stood in front of a larger-than-life image of the U.S. Constitution. In his first live teleconference, the NSA whistle-blower in asylum in Russia answered the obvious question about his role in improving privacy in America, Would you do it again?

“Would I do it again? Yes,” he said during his interview at the South by Southwest interactive conference on Monday. “Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we have a right to.”

Snowden’s talk, which lasted for about an hour in front of a crowd of almost 4,000 people and was streamed live online, was presented as the most anticipated event of a culture conference focused on privacy and surveillance.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke Saturday. Glenn Greenwald, the blogger who last year broke Snowden’s revelations of the vast surveillance apparatus constructed by the National Security Agency, spoke after Snowden.

Appearing on two jumbo screens inside Exhibit Hall Five at the Austin Convention Center, Snowden shared his thoughts — considered, spirited and concise enough to make for great sound bites or even tweets.

“We rely on the ability to trust our communications, and without that, our economy cannot succeed,” he said.

Later, Snowden made it clear how to make oversight more accountable, saying, “We can’t have officials like James Clapper lie to everyone in the country,” referring to the director of national intelligence.

He even addressed the NSA’s influence on the intelligence agencies of other nations. “If the NSA goes unrestrained, every international agency is given the green light to do the same,” he said.

Snowden’s legal adviser, Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, moderated the discussion and was joined by Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the project. In an interview with Al Jazeera’s “America Tonight,” Wizner described the current wave of support behind an enhanced and widespread conversation on privacy and surveillance in the United States as the “Snowden effect,” saying some cultural change is in motion already.

“Although mass surveillance is a huge challenge for free societies, there really are solutions that will make it much more difficult and more expensive not just for our government but for other governments to do it,” Wizner said.

Snowden’s teleconference at the interactive portion of SXSW presented a legitimate opportunity for developers to engage and be a part of the next step, Soghoian suggested.

“Technology got us to this surveillance state, and technology is the thing that can get us out of this surveillance state,” he told “America Tonight.” “I think Ed speaking here is really a powerful message that individual developers can make a difference in fighting the surveillance state.”

The process of booking three of the biggest players in the recent debate on U.S. privacy and security was a tedious process that took months.

Hugh Forrest, director of the interactive portion of SXSW, said Greenwald was the first, signing on for the conference in late October.

Benjamin Palmer, chairman of the Barbarian Group, a digital marketing and communications agency in New York, was having conversations with Assange’s people around the same time. Assange was confirmed in January, said Palmer, who moderated the virtual conversation with him on Saturday.

The final — and most difficult — piece of the puzzle was Snowden.

When Greenwald signed on, Forrest said he thought that the journalist was as close as the conference was going to get to Snowden, adding he would have been thrilled to have Greenwald alone. But just when it seemed Snowden was a long shot, there was a breakthrough in the fall of 2013.

“Someone in the community connected us with someone else, who had a better connection to Snowden,” Forrest told America Tonight. “They said, ‘Are you interested if we can pull him in?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

In a three-month period at the end of 2013, SXSW worked with the ACLU to finalize all the details concerning Monday’s discussion — the most important being the security of Snowden’s feed. Several channels and proxies were used to produce Snowden’s feed, which had choppy video but mostly clear audio.

“One of my first questions was, ‘Are we putting him in danger by doing this?’” Forrest said. “But we were confident with how it would work out.”

Last week’s announcement of Snowden’s teleconference was met with some pushback. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., wrote an open letter to the organizers of SXSW demanding that they rescind the invitation.

“Rewarding Mr. Snowden’s behavior in this way encourages the very lawlessness he exhibited,” Pompeo wrote.

Forrest said that rescinding Snowden’s invitation wasn’t part of the plan. And although organizers did not invite the NSA to speak at the conference this year, Forrest said he hopes the agency will consider participating in next year’s conference.

“I hope the presence of Snowden as well as Greenwald and Assange will put this on the NSA’s radar in a different way in the next year so they consider having speakers down here,” he said.

Whether real reform will take place remains unclear. But the message from Austin is clear.

“The lesson this year is everyone has to step up their game in terms of basic security for every reason,” Palmer told “America Tonight.” “It’s a really bad business.”

As Snowden’s image faded from the screens at the conclusion of his session, both his message and the medium served as reminders of the post-Snowden surveillance landscape and the calls for greater security in an unsecure world.

“The tech companies have already responded to this call to action and have already taken critical steps they should have taken a long time ago to improve user security and privacy,” Wizner told “America Tonight.” “All of this is really important. None of this would have happened without Ed Snowden.”