Wired
Edward Snowden “introduced himself as Ed” at a crypto party he led in Hawaii several months before his world-rattling leaks of national surveillance documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Poulsen reports in Wired.
The parties, which feature tutorials on hard drive encryption and how-tos on using the Internet anonymously, are the brainchild of Australian activist Asher Wolf, Poulsen writes:
The idea was for technologists versed in software like Tor and PGP to get together with activists, journalists, and anyone else with a real-life need for those tools and show them the ropes. By the end of 2012, there’d been more than 1,000 such parties in countries around the world, by Wolf’s count. They were non-political and open to anyone.
Snowden held the Hawaii party in an art space behind fishcake, a furniture store in Honolulu’s Kaka’ako district.
Technologist and writer Runa Sandvik shared details of the gathering with Wired. Sandvik was planning a vacation in the islands and told Snowden she could make a presentation at the gathering on Tor, an offer Snowden accepted.
Poulsen says the party shows Snowden’s “intentions are harder to doubt when you know that even before he leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to expose the surveillance world, he spent two hours calmly teaching 20 of his neighbors how to protect themselves from it.”
In contrast, a May 9 Wall Street Journal opinion piece reflects the assertion that Snowden may have been involved in espionage and in cahoots with foreign powers.
Also recently reported: Snowden’s gotten his own comic book, courtesy of Bluewater Productions:
Edward Snowden gets his own comic book today http://t.co/LqoP4deTmG pic.twitter.com/u3ZVmD9XWa
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 21, 2014
