Edward Snowden's New Job: Protecting Reporters from Spies

Nearly four years after his leaks, Edward Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them informa­tion in an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an National Security Agency analyst’s expertise in encryption or to exile them­selves to Moscow.

“Watch the journalists and you’ll find their sources,” Snowden says. “So how do we preserve that con­fidentiality in this new world, when it’s more important than ever?” Since early in 2016, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco–based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Its mission: to equip the media to do its job at a time when state-­sponsored hackers and government surveillance threaten investigative reporting in ways Woodward and Bernstein never imagined. “Newsrooms don’t have the bud­get, the sophistication, or the skills to defend them­selves in the current environment,” says Snowden. “We’re trying to provide a few niche tools to make the game a little more fair.”