Ed Snowden might be holed up in some Hong Kong hideaway at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he has to shut himself away from the world altogether. On the contrary, Snowden was keen to dispel some of the criticisms he’d received, as well as the denials from certain tech companies over the last few days, when he answered questions from the average Joe in a live Q&A session on The Guardian newspaper yesterday.

In the Q&A session, Snowden fielded questions on everything concerning the leaks, and also the political fallout from his revelations.

You can read Snowden’s answers in full here, but what struck me most of all was Snowden’s insistence that the US government really does have “direct access” to the servers of the nine tech companies said to be participating in PRISM. For their part, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and the others have all denied these claims, but according to Snowden these responses are somewhat “misleading,” even if they’re technically true.

Moreover, Snowden criticizes the companies, stating that while they might have a legal obligation to both comply with and not speak about PRISM, this doesn’t “comply them from an ethical obligation [to do so].”

“If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?”

Admittedly, Snowden’s comments can be a bit cryptic, but what he’s saying here echoes the opinions of numerous others – basically, tech companies had the opportunity to let the rest of the world know about what the US government was doing, yet they choose not to do so. Whether that’s because they feared the legal repercussions or because of some other incentive/disincentive remains unclear, but as Snowden alludes to, while it might cause a few problems with ‘the powers that be’, such a disclosure would have won them huge public sympathy had they acted first.

Obama: PRISM Is “Transparent”

Snowden wasn’t the only person to give an interview regarding PRISM yesterday. Buzzfeed separately published a “partial transcript” of an interview between talk show host Charlie Rose and President Obama, in which the President once again insisted that PRISM was “transparent,” whilst continuing to stress that the NSA couldn’t access the content of people’s phone calls and emails so long as they’re American citizens.

“if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they — and usually it wouldn’t be “they,” it’d be the FBI — go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause….”

Snowden’s and Obama’s accounts of PRISM and how it actually works seem to differ, but they do shed more light on how the government is able to access people’s private data, and under what circumstances. Essentially, it boils down to this – If you’re a non-US citizen, then the NSA or FBI or whoever else has access to the data, has few restrictions placed on them about what they can and cannot see. For US citizens meanwhile, there are at least some ‘legal’ restrictions (authorities have to apply to the FISA court for access), but whether these restrictions are adhered to in reality is anyone’s guess (Snowden says they’re not always).

One point that Snowden makes in his Q&A is that these restrictions are apparently just a matter of “policy”, which suggests that the capability exists for the NSA to look at US citizen’s data, only they’re not allowed to do so without a warrant. Snowden warns that because these restrictions are based on policy alone, they “could change at any time,” while he also claims that audits are “cursory, incomplete and easily fooled.”

Now back to Obama, and we have the following quote which will be seized upon by those who believe there’s a lack of judicial oversight in the whole process:

“Charlie Rose: But has FISA court turned down any request?”
Barack Obama: The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.”

Forget The Access, What About Storage?

We can agree that both sides disagree about just how much access the government has, but there’s another crucial issue that neither Snowden or Obama addressed in their latest interviews. Specifically, what kind of data does the government store, and how long is it stored for?

The worry is that even if the government is not misusing the data it collects today, what will happen in five, ten or twenty years time? If none of the data is ever deleted, then the potential for abuse will always be there – and so this needs to be addressed right away.

It’s one thing to know you’re going to be put under surveillance if you’re up to no good (and quite rightly to), but for an innocent person to be kept under that same level of surveillance, with everything they do online being monitored and stored, knowing that someday, someone might be tempted to abuse that data, is clearly not right.