At the conclusion of his appearance Monday at SXSW Interactive, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said he would do it all over again.
Asked if leaking the top secret NSA documents to the public was worth the personal price he has paid, Snowden said that he didn’t leak the documents “so I could sort of singlehandedly change the government, tell them what they should do. … What I wanted to do was inform the public.”
“The result has been that the public has benefited, the government has benefited, and every society in the world has benefited,” Snowden said. “Would I do this again? The answer is absolutely yes.”
Snowden was speaking via satellite video with Christopher Soghoian, the American Civil Liberties Union’s principal technologist. The conversation was moderated by Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project and Snowden’s legal advisor.
