Austin, Texas, is in full-on party mode as South by Southwest kicks off Friday, but the normally lighthearted Interactive portion of the festival is taking a serious turn this year by addressing the National Security Agency's PRISM program head-on, according to Time.com.
Reporter Glenn Greenwald, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will take the stage, Assange and Snowden via a livestream, over the next few days, and even Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt kicked off the festival's first day with deep thoughts on Google's role in the scandal, Time.com reported.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt speaks on the NSA and other topics at South by Southwest on Friday, according to Time.com.
"We were surprised" by the NSA revelations, Schmidt said during a Friday panel at South by Southwest with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, Time.com reported. The agency's work with GCHQ, Britain's surveillance agency, to tap into the fiber-optic networks that carry data between Google's data centers incensed the company, which worked quickly to put the kibosh on the program, called "Muscular."
"The very fact that they did this was very suspicious to us," Schmidt said, Time.com reported. "The solution to this is to encrypt data at multiple points of source. We now use 2048-bit encryption. We switch the keys at every session. We're pretty sure that any information that's inside of Google is safe from the government's prying eyes, including the U.S. government's."
Schmidt's wariness of the government extends to Snowden, who will also speak at SXSW this weekend, according to Time.com.
"We went to visit with Julian Assange, and both of us felt that who gets to decide what information is public is a pretty fundamental issue in democracy," Schmidt said, according to Time.com. "I don't think we want random people leaking large amounts of data. I don't think that serves society."
Schmidt was careful to maintain Google's support of an open Internet free from censorship, Time.com reported. He also criticized countries like Iran that want to lock down the Web and prevent the flow of information, and groups of countries that would band together to participate in the editing of the Internet.
