A month after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden arrived at the airport here, Russian computer-security expert Eugene Kaspersky fielded a question on the newly-exposed U.S. surveillance programs at his office down the road.
“There is no more privacy,” the 47-year-old CEO of antivirus software firm Kaspersky Lab told a group of journalists.
Mr. Kaspersky said consumers are paying the price of new technologies with their privacy, and argued that it is hard to tell whether the programs Mr. Snowden exposed are justifiable, because it is unclear how many lives they saved. “If you want to stay private, I know some places in Siberia,” he joked.
Mr. Kaspersky is far from a government skeptic. He says his closely held company works routinely with government security forces, including U.S. agencies and Russia’s Federal Security Service, to combat the spread of malicious software. He has called claims that he works too closely with Russian agencies “Cold War paranoia”, noting that his company has similar partnerships with governments world-wide.