Snowden: Big revelations to come, reporting them is not a crime

Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance on the TED stage in Vancouver -- and urged online businesses to encrypt their websites immediately.

"The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting lawyers, to protect users of the Internet around the world, is to enable Web encryption on every page you visit," he said. "If you look at a copy of 1984 on Amazon, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russians, the French can -- the world's library is unencrypted. This is something we need to change, not just for Amazon -- all companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default."

Snowden said the leaks from his document cache would continue. "There are absolutely more revelations to come," he said. "Some of the most important [publishing] to be done is yet to come." He said he struggled to find a way to leak the intelligence documents in as responsible a way as he could.

He said the NSA's PRISM program allowed the US government to "deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the National Security Agency. Another NSA program, Boundless Informant, was hidden from Congress, he said. "What Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America by Americans than in Russia by Russians." "The NSA has violated their own rules thousands of times in a single year -- in one event they intercepted all the calls in Washington DC by accident." Not only were there 2,776 abuses in 2011-12, he said, but the chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee had no idea that the rules were being broken thousands of times every year.