Apple's Steve Wozniak backs NSA whistleblower

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has found an unexpected admirer. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has backed the ex-NSA contractor while saying that he feels a bit guilty about the new technologies that companies are introducing as a way for governments to keep track on people. While talking to CNN, the Apple co-founder said,” I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot."

Rationalising his stance, Wozniak said that he was not the kind of person to just take sides about a matter, be it as a person who was always against the government and its “three letter agencies”.  However, he felt it was necessary to truly examine why a country’s government was elected in the first space. Reinforcing this, Wozniak said, “Read the facts: it is a government of, by and for the people. We own the government; we are the ones who pay for it and then we discover something that our money is being used for – that just can’t be, that level of crime.”

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When questioned about the level of involvement that innovators like him had in these endeavors, Wozniak acceded saying, “I actually feel a little guilty about that – but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world; any thought you had, you could share freely. We didn’t realise that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren’t. In the old days of mailing letters, you licked it, and when you got an envelope that was still sealed, nobody had seen it; you had private communication. Now they say, because it’s email, it cannot be private; anyone can listen.”

Apple’s Steve Wozniak backs Edward Snowden

While talking about US surveillance programmes with Spanish tech site FayerMayer, Woznik said, “All these things about the constitution, that made us such good people, all dissolved with the Patriot Act. There are all these laws that just say ‘we can secretly call anything terrorism and do anything we want, without the rights of courts to get in and say you are doing wrong things’. There’s not even a free open court any more. Read the constitution. I don’t know how this stuff happened. It’s so clear what the constitution says."

Candidly speaking about his upbringing, Woznik said that he was taught to believe that communist countries like Russia were considered evil because of the level adopted by governments to keep tabs on their citizens. Now that definition has blurred as more and more governments are resorting to the same method of tracking for their citizens.

The outrage over the recently uncovered NSA surveillance programme, codenamed PRISM, which saw phone and Internet usage records of millions of US citizens being collected without warrants, has opened up the ever-prevalent debate on security vs personal privacy. With Microsoft and Facebook just a few among the large list of Internet companies being regularly asked for information from government agencies, the thin line between keeping a country’s citizens safe and respecting their Right to Privacy seems to blurring more and more by the day.