Scandal is not spying on governments, but on people – Stallman to RT

Freedom and democracy are said to be guarantees of human rights, but as the NSA spying scandal recently showed, that isn't always the case. RT’s Oksana Boyko is joined by the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, to discuss the issue.

The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about US global spying activities have caused widespread concern. The scandal has raised many questions concerning human rights.

“We’ve just found out that Spain was helping the US to spy on everybody in Spain. And of course there was a deal between the US and England, when the US spy agencies couldn’t spy on the people in the US, but British spy agencies could spy on people in the US. So the two governments said ‘All right, each of us will spy on each other’s citizens and then we’ll trade and that way we’ll be shriveling our own people’,” Richard Stallman told RT’s Oksana Boyko.

American software computer programmer and activist, Richard Stallman, pioneered the concept of copyleft, a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

“The scandal is not spying on other governments and their activities, it’s spying on all the citizens, and, of course, the countries that work together to spy on the citizens of these countries,” Stallman said.

For more on digital freedom and oppression, politics and Arab spring, watch RT’s Worlds Apart with Oksana Boyko.