Nearly two years after his information about America's spying programs caused an international uproar, former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden will speak to an audience in London Tuesday, via live video feed.
The Q&A; session was set up by Amnesty International, which says "the information Snowden revealed has changed how we think about the technology we use" – and reshaped the public debate over governments' access to private information.
You can watch the event live, above. A discussion is also being held on Twitter, around the hashtag #AskSnowden. We'll update this post with news from Snowden's appearance.
Update at 2:55 p.m. ET: It Was All Worth It, Snowden Says
Tanya O'Carroll, Amnesty International's adviser on technology and human rights, introduces Snowden and asks him if it was all worth it.
"It was a stressful time, I'll be the first to say," Snowden says, "but it has. It has been incredibly rewarding, incredibly gratifying."
Snowden lists the things he has lost — including his job and the ability to see his family — and he also cites efforts that have been made to challenge surveillance, saying, "we get a different quality of government when they're accountable to the public."
"It's not that every intelligence agency is evil. It's not that they never do any good at all," Snowden says. "We want to have some level of intelligence-gathering. We want to be able to investigate criminals, we want to be able to respond to military threats. But that's a very far cry from watching everyone in society without regard to their guilt or innocence — to the mass surveillance of entire populations rather than individual people."
Our original post continues:
Snowden remains a fugitive from U.S. espionage charges. He's speaking today from Russia, where Snowden was granted a one-year asylum that was extended into a three-year residence permit last summer.
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