AI surveillance and freedom of speech, live from ETH Zurich

Surveillance and speech are the same fight

It's tempting to treat surveillance and censorship as separate problems. They aren't. They're two heads of the same system of control: watching people and silencing them are steps in one process. When everything you read, search, and say can be recorded and analyzed at scale, the recording alone changes behavior. People self-censor. Sources go quiet. Journalists lose the ability to protect the people who talk to them.

AI makes this cheaper and faster than ever. Where mass surveillance once needed rooms full of analysts, machine learning now sifts metadata — who talked to whom, when, from where, for how long — and reconstructs relationships, movements, and beliefs without ever reading a single message. That's the threat that defines this moment, and it's the one this panel was built to confront.

Who's on the panel

The ETHics Forum has assembled voices from three sides of the surveillance question — the person who exposed it, the people who report on it, and the people who built it.

• Edward Snowden (joining virtually) is the whistleblower whose 2013 disclosures revealed the scale of global mass surveillance, and reset the public conversation about it.
• Marguerite Meyer is an investigative journalist who reports on power, technology, and the systems that watch us.
• Vikram Subramanian is a former Google employee, speaking from inside the industry now racing to build AI surveillance tools.
• Dr Jaya Klara Brekke (moderator) is Nym's Chief Strategy Officer, who researches and writes on privacy, decentralization, and the politics of digital infrastructure.

Why Nym is bringing you the stream

Nym exists for exactly this argument. Our belief is simple: privacy should be a design choice, not a promise. Surveillance and censorship are the twin threats to an open internet, and the tools people use to move around online should resist both by architecture, not by asking you to trust that no one is watching.

That's the same conviction behind NymVPN, which protects not just the content of your traffic but the metadata around it, the exact signal AI-powered surveillance depends on. But tonight isn't a product pitch. It's a public conversation about where this technology is heading and what we're prepared to do about it. And it's one worth having in the open, in front of anyone who wants to listen.

How to watch

The panel is live from Audi Max at ETH Zurich, and Nym is streaming it so you don't have to be in the room. Full details are on the official event page.

Note: This is an ETH Zurich event, organized by the ETHics Forum, not a Nym event. Nym is taking part: moderating the panel and bringing you the livestream.

When: Thursday, September 24, 16:30 UTC (18:30 CEST) Where: Audi Max (HG F 30), ETH Zurich & streaming live Watch on: YouTube and Twitch Join the discussion: Come talk it through with the Nym community on TG, Matrix, and Youtube.

Set a reminder, bring your questions, and pull up a seat wherever you are.

We've shared a stage with Snowden before

This isn't the first time. When Nym launched its network and the $NYM token in Paris in 2022, Edward Snowden gave the keynote — a conversation on the future of privacy on the internet, and why anonymity is a precondition for a free society, not a luxury. It's as relevant now as it was then. Watch Snowden's Paris talk before you tune in tomorrow.

The internet we want is worth arguing for

Surveillance works best when no one is looking back. This is a chance to look back — to hear from the people who blew the whistle, reported the story, and walked away from the machine. Tune in, and join the fight for an internet that watches no one.