Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Proclaims Edward Snowden “a Hero”

Steve Wozniak, who co-founder Apple with Steve Jobs, has celebrated NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, calling him a “total hero” who “gave up his own life […] to help the rest of us.” In an interview with ITP.net, Wozniak celebrated Snowden and his work – not for the first time – praising him for following “his own heart”.

In the interview, when asked if he considered Snowden to be a hero or villain, Wozniak replied:

“Total hero to me; total hero. Not necessarily [for] what he exposed, but the fact that he internally came from his own heart, his own belief in the United States Constitution, what democracy and freedom was about. And now a federal judge has said that NSA data collection was unconstitutional.”

Woz then applauded Snowden for his sacrifices:

“So he’s a hero to me, because he gave up his own life to do it. And he was a young person, to give up his life. But he did it for reasons of trying to help the rest of us and not just mess up a company he didn’t like.”

He later spoke about the perils of maintaining privacy when using computers, considering the limited operating systems available and the security holes these large systems create:

“It’s almost impossible [to protect yourself] because today’s operating systems generally get so huge that they can only come from a few sources, like Microsoft, Google and Apple, and those operating systems have so many millions of lines of code in them, built by tens of thousands of engineers over time, that it’s so difficult to go back and detect anything in it that’s spying on you. It’s like having a house with 50,000 doors and windows and you have no idea where there might be a tiny little camera.”

Thank you Fortune and ITP.net for providing us with this information.