So SXSW is happening in Austin this week (it kicked off Friday and runs through Tuesday), and I wasn't there (I never go, it's always sounded like a very loud, very sweaty version of a tech conference I already don't love in its normal form) but I've had three tabs open since yesterday afternoon watching the aftermath of the Snowden session and I can't stop thinking about it.
Short version if you missed it: yesterday, March 10th, Edward Snowden did a talk at SXSW Interactive without actually being there. He beamed in over a video call, routed through something like seven proxies according to the people who set it up, sitting in front of a big projected image of the U.S. Constitution like he was trying to make the visual metaphor as unsubtle as possible. Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner from the ACLU did the actual interviewing since Snowden's obviously not wandering around the convention center handing out business cards.
And look, I want to talk about what he actually said, because it was a real specific ask and not just "surveillance bad." His pitch to the room full of developers and product people was basically: you built the tools the NSA is riding on top of, so you're the ones who can make mass collection expensive and annoying instead of cheap and easy. Encrypt by default. Stop making the metadata so convenient to sit on. He name-checked the idea that Google and Yahoo hardening their internal links after the Snowden leaks (there was reporting last fall about the NSA tapping traffic between their data centers) is the kind of thing that should've already been standard, not a scramble after the fact.
Here's my small complaint though, and it's a dumb one, but I have to say it: the video quality was rough. Like, choppy-Hangout-in-2011 rough, at a conference that is famously the place where every startup demoing an app wants their livestream to look flawless. There's something almost funny about the most surveilled man on the planet dialing into the most surveillance-conscious room in America over a connection that kept stuttering every time he tried to make a point about metadata. I don't say that to be snarky about the substance, I just think if you're going to stage the most-talked-about tech keynote of the week, somebody should've tested the pipe first.
The thing that actually sticks with me is less the talk itself and more watching the discourse split in real time. Half the timeline was "finally, someone with actual credibility telling the industry to fix this," the other half was some flavor of "cute stunt, still a fugitive, still complicated." I don't think those two things cancel out. You can think the surveillance stuff he brought to light mattered a lot (I do) and also think the SXSW format (celebrity-style Q&A, applause lines, a giant Constitution slide) turns something serious into a bit of a show. Both of those are true at once and I'm tired of people acting like picking one means you have to drop the other.
Anyway. If you work on anything that touches user data — and at this point that's most of us, even folks like me running a blog with a comment box — the actual homework from yesterday isn't "have an opinion about Snowden." It's smaller than that: go look at whether your site forces HTTPS, whether your mail server does TLS by default, whether you're logging IPs longer than you actually need for anything. I went and checked my own setup last night after watching this and honestly it wasn't as tidy as I'd have liked. Nothing dramatic, just some log retention I never bothered to trim because disk is cheap and I never thought about who'd want to read three years of visitor IPs. Fixed it in about twenty minutes. Not exactly heroic, but it's the kind of small unglamorous chore that the whole talk was arguing actually adds up.
Also, unrelated, but if anyone from Austin wants to tell me whether the barbecue lines were as bad as always this year, my email's in the sidebar.