Edward Snowden, American NSA Whistleblower to Address Web Summit 2019

Author

MNI Media

Release Date

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

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Web Summit  2019 today announced that Edward Snowden, American NSA whistleblower, is set to address over 70,000 attendees at this year's Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal

This November, Snowden will speak live to the Web Summit audience in Lisbon down the line from Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum. Snowden made news around the world after releasing classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013.

According to the Web Summit organisers, Snowden is set to reveal the story behind his work for the NSA, how he helped build the mass surveillance system which collected millions of phone calls, text messages, and emails of US citizens and why he chose to expose it the way he did rather than following the standard protocol.

In the past, Web Summit has welcomed privacy and security activists such as European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager who will be returning again this year; the late Stephen Hawking; Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon; Garry Kasparov, Chess Grandmaster and Security Ambassador at Avast; Hicham Oudghiri, Co-Founder & CEO at Enigma Technologies; Natalia Oropeza, Chief Cyber Security Officer at Siemens AG, and more.

Alongside Vestager, other speakers recently announced to speak at this year’s event include the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair; former professional boxer, Wladimir Klitschko; son of Will Smith and founder of JUST Water, Jaden Smith; Guo Ping, Rotating Chairman of Huawei, and Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia.

About Permanent Record
In 2013, 29 year old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.

Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online – a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience.

Written with wit, grace, passion, and unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

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