Edward Snowden recently gave a rare interview with NOVA Next, a Russian channel. In it he explained that that the U.S. government wrongly promotes cyber offense strategies at the expense of weakening the system and leaving it open to cyber attacks from the black market.
“We’re creating a class of Internet security researchers who research vulnerabilities, but then instead of disclosing them to the device manufacturers to get them fixed and to make us more secure, they sell them to secret agencies,” Snowden says. “They sell them on the black market to criminal groups to be able to exploit these to attack targets. And that leaves us much less secure, not just on an individual level, but on a broad social level; on a broad economic level. And beyond that, it creates a new black market for computer weapons, basically digital weapons.”
Snowden also points out that other countries such as Iran are ahead of the US in realizing the problem, “But it is important to highlight that we really started this trend in many ways when we launched the Stuxnet campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. It actually kicked off a response, sort of retaliatory action from Iran, where they realized they had been caught unprepared. They were far behind the technological curve as compared to the United States and most other countries. And this is happening across the world nowadays, where they realize that they’re caught out. They’re vulnerable. They have no capacity to retaliate to any sort of cyber campaign brought against them.”
Snowden has been living in Russia since releasing documents showing the U.S. had been spying on citizens through several technology companies. He is wanted in the U.S. on criminal charges for theft and misuse of classified information. Snowden dismissed former CIA director Michael Hayden’s predictions that he would wind up a sad and miserable drunk in Russia.
