Apple co-founder Wozniak supports NSA whistleblower

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan on Thursday 20 June that he supports people like former NSA c0ntractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden released information into the public domain by contacting two newspapers and revealing details of how the USA’s National Security Agency and other organisations were spying on citizens.

When asked by Morgan if he is a fan of someone like Snowden, Wozniak said, “Yes. There are some people that take sides in the world, like ‘I’m always against anything government or any three-letter agency’, or ‘I’m for them because I’m on the opposite side.’

But I’m not like that, and I tried to say ‘what is really happening here?’ I feel the same way about Edward Snowden the way I felt about Daniel Ellsburg (a former United States military analyst) , who changed my life – who taught me a lot with the book he wrote. You read the facts, and it’s a government of-, by- and for- the people – that sort of means that we own the government. We are the ones who pay for it, and then we discover something that our money is being used for … that just can’t be that level of crime.”

Morgan then stated to Wozniak that if they had not developed such sophisticated computers, the government would not be able to snoop around people’s affairs. Wozniak added that he actually felt a little bit guilt for playing an indirect role in it.

“You know, I actually feel a little guilty about this, but not totally – because we created the computers to free the people up, to give them instant communication anywhere in the world and any thought you had could be shared freely, it was going to overcome a lot of the government restrictions. We didn’t imagine that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren’t. Now they say because it is email, it cannot be private and anyone can listen.”

Morgan then posed a follow-up question about where Wozniak saw computers going in the next decade. To this Wozniak replied, “The computers are going to get smarter and smarter, and more like humans. Like now we are speaking commands to them, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very frustrating when you speak to it and it gets the words right, but your phone doesn’t know what you mean. That is going to get better and better over the next ten years.”

Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor