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Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy agency contractor who leaked details of major U.S. surveillance programs, called on supporters at a hacking conference to spur development of easy-to-use technologies to subvert government surveillance programs around the globe.
Snowden, who addressed conference attendees on Saturday via video link from Moscow, said he intends to devote much of his time to promoting such technologies, including ones that allow people to communicate anonymously and encrypt their messages…
At the HOPE hacking conference, several talks detailed approaches for thwarting government surveillance, including a system known as SecureDrop that is designed to allow people to anonymously leak documents to journalists.
Attorneys with the Electronic Frontier Foundation answered questions about pending litigation with the NSA, including efforts to stop collection of phone records that were disclosed through Snowden’s leaks.
Snowden is seen as a hero by a large segment of the community of hackers attending the HOPE conference [and the nation and the world], which includes computer experts, anti-surveillance activists, artists and other types of hackers.
HOPE in this case stands for Hackers On Planet Earth.
And if you think every kind of government snoop wasn’t doing their best to photogrqph, record and trace everyone at the conference – you’re still living in cloud cuckoo-land — watching Father Knows Best on TV.
Eideard 
Keep on rocking in the Free World.
“New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates the Constitution : A former Obama administration official calls attention to unaccountable mass surveillance conducted under the guise of a 1981 executive order.” http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-new-surveillance-whistleblower-emerges/374722/
“Talk on cracking Internet anonymity service Tor canceled” http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/us-cybercrime-conference-talk-idUSKBN0FQ1QB20140721 Carnegie Mellon attorney informed Black Hat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hat_Briefings ) that one of the speakers could not give the Tor talk (Re: “You don’t have to be the NSA to Break Tor: De-Anonymizing Users on a Budget”) because the materials he would discuss have not been approved for public release by the university or the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The institute, based at the university, is funded by the Defense Department. SEI also runs CERT, historically known as the Computer Emergency Response Team, which works with the Department of Homeland Security on major cybersecurity issues.