Edward Snowden's notoriety as the one who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance tactics on U.S. and international citizens is now historically set in stone, so his appearance via Google+ Hangout at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas this week has garnered a bit more than general surprise. His video message to the audience was broadcast from Russia, where he is currently housed in asylum, and he made a point to mention that the current surveillance operations of the U.S. are not preventing terrorism, but rather missing clues altogether.

Reports detail Snowden's inflammatory speech as welcomed by the SXSW crowd, despite his pending charges for criminal espionage after he exposed many classified documents to global news organizations, which then went live to the public in June 2013 and have since trickled out in media. The Washington Post quoted part of his speech, detailing how egregious the failure in intelligent surveillance as been on the part of the U.S.:

“We've actually had a tremendous intelligence failure because . . . we're monitoring everybody's communications instead of suspects' communications.”