Teens Obediently Ask Snowden Boring Questions About Resisting Surveillance

​What advice does Edward Snowden have for today's teens?

"Ineffective resistance is better than no resistance," the former US National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower told a Canadian high school Monday evening, where he was asked to speak about pervasive surveillance and tracking of our online communications and behaviour.

"We have security for everyone or security for none," he said in another gloomy soundbite.

While not exactly the most uplifting of keynotes, Snowden at least appeared upbeat in his address to some 1,300 students and parents at the annual World Affairs Conference held at Toronto's Upper Canada College—probably Canada's most elite prep school and incubator for generations of business and political leaders.

Speaking from an undisclosed location in Russia over video link, Snowden listed the now familiar reasons why he absconded with thousands of classified files and shared them with the press: the surveillance state has grown too powerful, governments are breaking the law, the public have a right to know what is being done in their name. He was joined on the call by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been Snowden's most trusted journalist since fleeing the US in 2013, but most of the attention was understandably on the 31-year-old former spy.

But if an audience of 17-year-olds was somewhat novel for a man used to addressing parliamentarians and technologists, many of the questions were stultifyingly tedious. How would you redirect the NSA's budget? When should one abandon legal channels for reform? What about China's potential to supplant the United States as a global hegemon?

"Wow, high school students?" Snowden remarked at one point.

I guess I imagined that teens would have more practical questions, like whether to use real names online, how to hide their embarrassing Facebook posts from potential employers, or how to keep their Snapchat photos private. Instead, it felt like the editorial board of The Economist had been shrunken down and put in prep school blazers.

In fact, students were specifically warned against asking "irrelevant" questions, such as what Snowden's spirit animal is. The former spy volunteered that information anyway: "I'm an internet guy, so it would have to be a cat."

Snowden's speech to a Canadian audience came mere days after a new report based on Snowden documents showed the country's spies closely monitor fil​e-sharing websites and keep track of millions of downloads each day. The federal Conservative government also recently unveiled new anti-terrorism measures that would increase police and intelligence powers to monitor and remove online speech if deemed to be "advocating or promoting terrorism."

That's probably not the direction anyone thought we'd be heading after the last two years of revelations, based on yet more Snowden documents, that have revealed how utterly pervasive online surveillance has become in Canada, the United States and other Western countries.

Admittedly there are some efforts at reform, such as mild new oversight measures announced by U.S. President B​arack Obama this week. The real impact of his decision to leak classified information to the press, however, may not be felt for years, but there's no denying that privacy and surveillance are part of an ongoing public debate now thanks to Snowden.

Conference coordinator Conor Healy said he had been working for close to a year to secure Snowden as a speaker and that most students supported the whistleblower.

"Generally speaking, our demographic is more supportive of Snowden and less supportive of the surveillance that the NSA and other government agencies have implemented," Healy told me Monday. "It's an audience that appreciates his perspective."

Snowden, who himself never graduated from high school, repeated his claim that his own story is unimportant compared to what the documents have revealed even as his projected face took up the entire wall at the front of a packed auditorium Monday.

"Whether or not I'm Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, that has no bearing whatsoever on the content of the reporting," he said.

After the applause died down, and questions of global hegemony were duly settled, his teenage audience filed into another room where they enjoyed cookies and juice. Many immediately took out their smartphones and started idly thumbing through their social networks. To the side, a jazz band entertained the leaders of tomorrow.

Had they fully absorbed Snowden's dire warnings about the ever-expanding surveillance state and the destruction of privacy? If anyone is going to have the power to reverse those trends, it will probably be today's teens.