Ten years ago, Edward Snowden leaked thousands of top-secret intelligence documents to the media while working for the National Security Agency. The documents exposed a government-led surveillance program where everyday citizens were being spied on and revealed coordinated systems between the government and telecommunications companies. 

Nothing has changed, and it’s even gotten worse, Snowden said Friday at Coindesk’s Consensus conference. “They’re doing it even more now,” he said during his keynote speech.  

“The question that we need to consider when looking to the future is if the government is the great teacher of the people,” Snowden said via video address. He wondered what lessons were learned by corporations from the ease with which they were allowed to spy on U.S. citizens. “Not only are they going to do it, regardless of what the courts say, they’re going to do it even more,” he said. 

In 2013 the U.S. Department of Justice charged Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act. Two days later he flew to Moscow and in 2022, after several years in limbo, was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladmir Putin. That same year, Snowden pledged an oath of allegiance to Russia. In 2020, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that the surveillance apparatus exposed by Snowden was illegal and likely unconstitutional.

At the conference in Austin, Texas last week, Snowden voiced concerns that machines would never have done what he did and are incapable of betraying governments. With algorithmic controls, “the secret would have been kept forever,” he said. “That’s where we’re heading. We’re seeing more power concentrated into fewer hands. Companies that didn’t have this technology 10 years ago are now saying, ‘why don’t we do this, too?’”

Snowden added, “we need to move away from this, because there’s some kind of accountability released. What happens when the machine starts making mistakes?”

While AI is hypnotizing the world, it’s a paradox to the web3 promise, as AI is dependent on data. 

“I see these large models being closed off as a big problem,” Snowden said. “Naming a company OpenAI is a cruel joke because they refused to provide public access to their training data and models.” 

Snowden believes the primary mistake is researchers are trying to teach machines to think like humans. “The reality is that, as with children, we don’t need machines to be like us. We need them to be better than us,” he said.