Edward Snowden wants hackers to design anti-surveillance tech

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden wants hackers to help develop new technologies that will help users access the Internet without government snooping. His plea for assistance was via video chat from Moscow, where he is becoming more vocal about snooping.

"You in this room, right now have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day," Snowden recently told the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) attendees. "That is what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in."

SecureDrop, a service so whistleblowers can leak documents to the media, is one new technology that is being discussed at the conference. There is a great opportunity for software development after Snowden gave a much better picture of some of the surveillance programs currently underway.