Whistleblowing

Edward Snowden Sounds Off on Fake News and Surveillance

Now exiled perilously in Russia, Snowden weighed in on PRISM, a secret government program designed to collect customers’ personal data from Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech companies. “All of these guys were going beyond what the law required to give the government information off of their servers,” Snowden said of the companies. “They were spying on people’s pornography viewing habits to discredit their politics.”

Snowden also lamented the emergence of fake news, which may have been critical in swinging the election. “There’s a sad thing happening in journalism right now where it feels like the truth doesn’t matter,” Snowden said in the interview. “You get real news stories that well-reported and are out there. But nobody in the Twitter realm retweets them.”