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“Cast your vote but don’t join a cult,” he said, while speaking virtually to thousands of attendees gathered around a main stage at this year’s annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville.
At the beginning of his talk, Snowden said that he didn’t want to make his talk about politics. But his plea was later reprised as closing remarks. Toward the middle, he spoke cautiously about the prospect of political change stemming from elections, comparing it to redressed authority.
“As far as the average worker is concerned, whether we're talking about this election or any other in the last 20 years, a given election tends to result in what feels like a different uniform on the same cop,” he said. “And that's a problem.”
The backdrop for this year’s Bitcoin conference has been tinged with shades of red, with former President Donald Trump slated to be its biggest speaker Saturday. Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and the former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy spoke on Friday, too.
At the same time, Snowden’s speech was sandwiched between two other political chats. Before Snowden spoke, Sen. Cynthia Lummis had an emphatic chat with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) about Bitcoin. The presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent, came after.
“We have to work together, and we have to make sure they do not reduce this country to the land of the fee and the home of the slave,” Snowden said. “The only way we will do that is if we work together.”
Snowden has been a prominent privacy advocate for years, warning against the sanctioning of crypto-based privacy tools like Tornado Cash. He’s also been a vocal skeptic of central bank digital currencies, warning that they could serve as government-backed surveillance tools.
One key element of Snowden’s speech was the notion that governments will mine people’s metadata using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It’s turning what was once an analyst’s task into heaping servings of data that can be analyzed instantaneously by complex machines.
Regardless of who wins at the ballot box in November, Snowden said the trend is unlikely to change. According to him, it’s a fantasy to assume that AI isn’t being leveraged to create profiles of people’s personal spending habits already.
As governments leverage AI technology to surveillance financial transactions, he added that Bitcoin’s public ledger is a prime location for models to train.
“We're running out of time to fix this, and the consequences of ignoring it are a whole lot worse,” he said. “This is not Terminator, right? This is not Skynet. This is not robots in the sky to drag you out of your home. That might come someday, but that's a long way off.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.