Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance at TED today, telling the mostly supportive crowd to expect more revelations from his vast cache of secret National Security Agency documents. 
 
 The NSA whistleblower took to the stage during the conference’s second day via a video chatbot he controlled from what TED organizer Chris Anderson called an “undisclosed location.” Snowden said there are still revelations to be made and stories to be told about the intelligence agency. “I don’t think there’s any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come,” Snowden said, just one week after appearing at SXSW in Austin, Texas. 
 
 ‘To people who have seen and enjoyed the free and open internet, it’s up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy.’ 
 
 —Edward Snowden 
 
 Rather than the traditional 18-minute TED talk, in which a single speaker addresses the audience, Anderson essentially interviewed Snowden. Through a strikingly clear connection, the bot-ified Snowden was poised and good-humored as he called on tech companies to make SSL encryption the default for browsing the web. “To people who have seen and enjoyed the free and open internet, it’s up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy,” he said. 
 
 Anderson suggested that Snowden’s sentiments parallel those of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, who has recently used the 25th anniversary of the world wide web to call for an “internet bill of rights.” But because this was TED, Anderson didn’t have to speculate on the similarities between the goals of Snowden and Berners-Lee. He simply brought Berners-Lee on stage to find out. 
 
 Asked by Anderson whether he thought Snowden was a traitor or a hero, Berners-Lee went with “hero, if you have to make the choice between the two.” Snowden said internet rights were not just about principles but about technology. “I believe a magna carta for the internet is exactly what we need,” Snowden said. “We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the internet.” 
 
 Berners-Lee told Snowden that his hope on the web’s 25th anniversary was to get everyday users who don’t normally consider the internet in terms of rights to consider the web they really want. He asked Snowden how he thought the web would best work. “When we think about it in terms of how far we can go, I think that’s a question that’s limited only by what we’re willing to do,” Snowden said. “I think the internet that we’ve enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we, not just as a nation but as a people around the world, need.” If the web’s technologists can truly enlist the web’s casual users as allies, he said, “we’ll get not just the internet we’ve had, but a better internet.” 
 
 At the end of Snowden’s appearance, Anderson stuck a TED conference badge on Snownden’s bot and invited him to stick around for the week. With that, he rolled offstage, accompanied by his lawyer. ||||| Zoom in on this story . Explore all there is to know. 
 
 Edward Snowden appears by robot at a TED conference in Vancouver. Photo: AFP 
 
 Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has emerged from his Russian exile in the form of a remotely-controlled robot to promise more sensational revelations about US spying programs. 
 
 The fugitive's face appeared on a screen as he manoeuvred the wheeled android around a stage at the TED gathering, addressing an audience in Vancouver without ever leaving his secret hideaway. 
 
 "There are absolutely more revelations to come," he said. "Some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come." 
 
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 Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who has been charged in the United States with espionage, dismissed the public debate about whether he is a heroic whistleblower or traitor. 
 
 Instead, he used the conference organised by educational non-profit organisation TED, or Technology Entertainment Design, to call for people worldwide to fight for privacy and internet freedom. 
 
 Internet creator Tim Berners-Lee briefly joined Snowden's interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, and came down in the hero camp. 
 
 When Anderson posed the question to the TED audience – known for famous, innovative, and influential attendees – the idea that Snowden was a force for good met with applause. 
 
 Hero or traitor? 
 
 "Hero patriot or traitor; I would say I am an American citizen just like anyone else," Snowden said. 
 
 "What really matters here is the kind of government we want; the kind of internet we want." 
 
 He sais he was inspired to pass a huge trove of NSA files to reporters when he saw US spying tactics going too far and intruding into the private data of millions of internet and telephone customers. 
 
 Snowden argued that if he had gone to the US Congress with his concerns he would have risked being "buried along with the information". 
 
 Snowden instead urged the "adversarial press" to challenge government and ignite public debate "without putting national security at risk". 
 
 He argued the dangers critics have played up regarding disclosure of information have not materialised, and insisted he remains comfortable with his decisions. 
 
 He depicted the NSA's PRISM program for getting user information from internet firms as a way for the US government to "deputise corporate America to do its dirty work". 
 
 And he blasted a US secret court for seldom rejecting NSA requests to compel internet companies to turn over user data and US legislators for showing little oversight. 
 
 Snowden urged internet companies to stand against online snooping by encrypting online activity by default so spies could easily note anything from book browsing at Amazon.com to visiting websites. 
 
 People should be able to book air travel, order books, make phone calls and send text messages without worrying about how it will look to an agent of the government, Snowden declared. 
 
 "More communications are being intercepted in America about Americans that there are in Russia about Russians," Snowden said. 
 
 Terrorism mantra 
 
 Snowden argued the NSA is making the US, and the world, less safe by lobbying for weak standards that could open back doors into online venues or services such as online commerce or banking. 
 
 "Our basic freedoms are not a partisan issue," he said. 'It is up to us to protect them; it is up to us to preserve the open internet." 
 
 Snowden endorsed the campaign by Berners-Lee for a global Magna Carta laying out values and rights on the internet. 
 
 "A Magna Carta for the internet is exactly what we need," Snowden said. 
 
 Anderson said the NSA had been invited to take part in the TED chat with Snowden, but it did not work out "for logistical reasons". 
 
 AFP 
 
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 It wasn't the newsiest moment in Edward Snowden's address to TED, which he delivered via video that was streamed through a robot. (Check out the picture.) The news, as ever, was probably Snowden's claim that "some of the most important reporting" on his revelations "is yet to come." This is probably true. The archives of documents stolen by Snowden have been enough to support breaking news at the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Pro Publica, to name a few outlets that got some access; an entirely new media company, First Look, was launched on the strength of what Glenn Greenwald, et al. could find in the archives. 
 
 So, no, not newsy, but the part of Snowden's Q&A that stuck out to me was his gleeful swipe at Dick Cheney. 
 
 At the time Julian Assange was doing his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he’d endangered governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite, seas would boil off. Now he says it was a fleabite. We should be suspicious of overblown claims from these officials. But! Let’s assume that these people really believe this. I would argue they have a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. 
 
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 This is not the first time Snowden has made fun of Cheney, whose appeal to the D.C. chat circuit has not dimmed even after he helped his daughter make a spectacular hash of a U.S. Senate primary. Last year, Cheney came up on a Guardian chat and Snowden called it an "honor" to be insulted by the guy. 
 
 So Snowden, who recently turned 30, is adept at the art of insult trading with political figures. Why does it matter? Well, some of the (embryonic) discussion of whether Snowden should leave Russia and give himself up to American justice comes out of the theory that Snowden should become an advocate for his cause. He has controlled his image like ... well, like a guy who doesn't give out his contact info and lives in a country that American journalists need a visa to visit. In the last few months, he's given interviews to Bart Gellman, SXSW, and TED, all of which 1) broke the news he wanted, 2) avoided the news he didn't (no one has asked him, in a public forum, anything about Russian politics or the Crimean incursion), and 3) allowed him to describe his whistleblowing in heroic terms. In the SXSW interview, he even appeared before a screen blow-up of the Constitution. 
 
 Snowden is winning, as shown by the polls and the fumbling responses of American politicians. He's even come up with a reason for his skeptics to distrust the NSA. "If we hack Chinese business and steal its secrets, or those in Berlin, that’s of less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can’t get access to our secrets," he said at TED. "In reducing the security of our own communications, they’re putting us at risk in a fundamental way." ||||| VANCOUVER, Canada — Edward Snowden on Tuesday said the biggest revelations have yet to come out of the estimated 1.7 million documents he acquired from the National Security Agency. 
 
 In a surprise appearance via satellite robot at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver, Snowden said there is still a lot of reporting to be done, including diving deeper into the accusation that the NSA tricks companies into building backdoors into their systems that make data vulnerable to hackers across the world. 
 
 "Is it really terrorism that we're stopping? I say no," Snowden said. "The bottom line is that terrorism [...] has always been a cover for actions. Terrorism evokes an emotional response." 
 
 Snowden, who is still in hiding somewhere in Russia, maintained that his act wasn't reckless and that he did it all for the American people. He also said he would love to return to the United States — if granted immunity. 
 
 "I don't want to harm my government" he said. "The fact that they're willing to ignore due process and declare guilt without a trial [...] these are things we need to work against as a society." 
 
 Snowden remains a controversial figure throughout the world, but he was speaking to the right crowd at TED. When Anderson asked the audience who disagreed with Snowden's actions, only a few hands shot into the air. When he asked if the room felt Snowden was right in handing over the NSA's secret, the audience erupted with applause. Tim Berners-Lee, a man widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web, then stepped on stage to talk with Snowden. 
 
 He called him a "hero." 
 
 After Snowden exposed NSA programs like PRISM, many Americans wanted to know why they should care about this surveillance if they're not guilty of doing anything wrong. Snowden said it comes down to protecting rights. 
 
 "Rights matter because you never know when you’re going to need them," Snowden said, adding that people should be able to pick up the phone and call their family, send a text to their loved ones and travel by train without worrying about how these events will look to a government years in the future. 
 
 The former NSA contractor has been on a public relations tour over the past few weeks, embracing the public debate that has erupted over his actions. He recently made an appearance at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas via satellite, in which he touched on similar talking points that he did on Tuesday. 
 
 "I am living proof that an individual can go head to head with the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world — and win," Snowden said. ||||| Story highlights "Would I do it again? Absolutely," Edward Snowden says of leaking documents 
 
 "We need a watchdog that watches Congress," the NSA leaker says from Russia 
 
 "There's a political response that needs to occur," but also "a tech response" 
 
 He speaks via teleconference to SXSW tech conference in Texas 
 
 In a rare public talk via the Web, fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden urged a tech conference audience Monday to help "fix" the U.S. government's surveillance of its citizens. 
 
 He spoke via teleconference from Russia to an audience of thousands at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. The event marked the first time the former National Security Agency contractor has directly addressed people in the United States since he fled the country with thousands of secret documents last June. 
 
 In response to a question, Snowden said he had no regrets about his decision to leak the NSA documents, which showed the intelligence agency has conducted secret monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet behavior in the name of national security. 
 
 "Would I do it again? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had a right to," he said. 
 
 "I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And I saw the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale," he added, to applause from the 3,000 people in the auditorium at the Austin Convention Center. 
 
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 "South by Southwest and the tech community, the people in the room in Austin, they're the folks who can fix this," Snowden said earlier. "There's a political response that needs to occur, but there's also a tech response that needs to occur." 
 
 He appeared on video screens with a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a backdrop. The live stream was slow, repeatedly freezing Snowden's image onscreen. 
 
 The pair of American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who hosted the discussion said Snowden's video, ultimately delivered via Google Hangouts, was streamed through several routers for security. 
 
 Snowden also said Internet users need more awareness, and better tools, to help them secure their online information from prying eyes. 
 
 While tech geeks may have no problem using encryption tools to scramble their messages or accessing the more-private "deep Web" via clients like Tor, Snowden said the average Web user should be able to access similar protections. 
 
 "This is something that people have to be able to interact with, and the way we interact with it now is not that good," he said. 
 
 Snowden took questions from two moderators -- the ACLU's Chris Sogohian and Ben Wizner, his legal counsel -- from the audience, and from Twitter. The first, fittingly, came from Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web 25 years ago this week. Berners-Lee asked Snowden what he would change about the nation's surveillance system. 
 
 "We need public oversight ... some way for trusted public figures to advocate for us. We need a watchdog that watches Congress, because if we're not informed, we can't consent to these (government) policies." 
 
 Asked about the difference between government surveillance and snooping by private Internet companies, Snowden said he considers government surveillance more insidious because "the government has the ability to deprive you of rights. They can jail you." 
 
 Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor who fled the United States after leaking details of the American government's spy programs, was granted temporary asylum in Russia last year. 
 
 He faces felony charges of espionage and theft of government property in the United States, and he has said he won't return until the U.S. changes its whistleblower protection laws. 
 
 Reaction among SXSW audience members to Snowden's comments appeared mixed. 
 
 "I think it was right on," said Michael Chalcraft, a retired software entrepreneur from Seattle. "There's always a balance between what the government should know about us and what we would expect to be private. 
 
 "If we're not constantly protecting that privacy, then we give it up." 
 
 But Megan Betterman, a health-care marketer from Minneapolis, didn't hear everything she wanted from Snowden. 
 
 "I wanted to hear about what his life is like there (in Russia), and whether he'll ever come back to the U.S.," she said. "It (his talk) was very encryption-heavy." 
 
 More than 30,000 attendees are currently in Austin for the 10-day SXSW festival, which began Friday and wraps on March 16. 
 
 The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit media organization, live streamed the session. 
 
 Also scheduled to speak at the tech-themed conference Monday afternoon -- although in person -- was journalist and civil-liberties lawyer Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story about Snowden's leaks of classified NSA documents. 
 
 Snowden's call for developers to create secure, private networks for their users is less of a no-brainer at South by Southwest than it may have once been. Having emerged from the counter-culture of the early Web, SXSW Interactive has exploded in recent years as more businesses have sought to tap into successful startups' millions of users. 
 
 In the same Austin convention hall where Snowden called for new privacy tools, other sessions were helping entrepreneurs learn how to make money with the data they collect about the users of their products.
– Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance—via a remote-controlled video chat robot—at the TED conference yesterday, and, as at his SXSW appearance, he got a warm welcome. The inventor of the Internet himself, Tim Berners-Lee, appeared onstage and called Snowden a hero, Wired reports, and a vocal segment of the crowd agreed, according to Fortune, with only about 10% deeming him a villain. Snowden's most headline-generating pronouncement was that "there are absolutely more revelations to come. Some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come." But the appearance itself fascinated David Weigel at Slate. Snowden has essentially positioned himself as a "cyborg thought leader," Weigel writes. With these appearances, he's "controlled his image like … well, like a guy who doesn't give out his contact info and lives in a country that American journalists need a visa to visit." Snowden's TED and SXSW hosts asked exactly the questions he wanted and avoided uncomfortable ones he didn't—like, say, anything to do with Russian politics. "Snowden has outlived the DB Cooper mystery that defined his public debut, and is now situated for a long game in which he becomes more popular and harder to call a traitor." Click for Weigel's full column.