Edward Snowden, the infamous whistleblower of the United States government, believes that aliens could be trying to communicate with Earth right now, but encryption would make it hard and maybe even impossible to distinguish their attempts to talk to Earth from cosmic microwave background radiation.
Snowden was a former contractor for the National Security Agency that has turned into a fugitive living in asylum in Russia after leaking classified documents back in 2013 that reveal the top-secret mass surveillance program of the government.
Snowden appeared on the StarTalk podcast by Neil deGrasse Tyson through a robot video link named a "beam remote presence system," where the whistleblower revealed things such as signing up for the United States army after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The conversation touched upon the possibility that aliens could be trying to communicate with humans, but this is made harder due to data encryption.
"If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted," said Snowden, adding that it is not easy to distinguish between communication that is encrypted and random sounds.
Snowden continued by saying that, as humans and aliens become more advanced and transform open communications into encrypted communications, the signals which are attempts to reach out to one another could stop being recognizable.
According to Snowden, alien civilizations could be trying to listen for communications from other civilizations, and the human civilization could be doing the same. However, there is only a small period during the development of societies wherein communication would be sent through unprotected methods. Afterwards, messages from aliens received by humans would be under so much encryption that they would not be recognized as such.
Tyson, however, said that aliens could only be placing so much encryption on their communications if their civilizations have similar security problems as humans, referring to the issues that Snowden revealed a couple of years ago. Snowden, however, thinks that aliens would be more sophisticated in terms of politics compared to humans.
All of this is of course just speculation. However, the possibility of alien signals and communications possibly hitting the Earth's satellites and being dismissed due to heavy encryption is thought-provoking at the very least.
