Date of article: Sept 2015
Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/edward-snowden-says-aliens-could-be-trying-to-get-in-touch-right-now/

Finally we hear Snowden talking about UFOs and aliens, its what we have all been waiting for. I know aliens encrypt their messages, like the one being sent from comet 67P for the last 20 years.
Scott C. Waring
www.ufosightingsdaily.com

News states:
Edward Snowden, who used to be a contractor for the NSA before he became famous for leaking some of its practices, worries that we might currently be deaf to alien communication. He expressed this view during a fascinating chat with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his StarTalk podcast. This was courtesy of a robot-controlled video screen from his Moscow location — a communication system that DeGrasse Tyson described as “an iPad on wheels.” It was wide-ranging chat between two nerds. Sample from Snowden: He once read a metallurgy textbook. Sexy, that. Still, they got onto the subject of encryption and how it might affect communicating with otherworldly beings. “If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted,” Snowden said. “You can’t distinguish a properly encrypted communication from random behavior.” In essence, he believes that if aliens are smart, they’ll already be encrypting everything. He said that communication remains unencrypted “until society realizes how dangerous that is.” Are we there yet? Yes, we are. The consequence for potential human-alien chats is this: “If you have an an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there’s only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.” If something is perfectly encrypted, you wouldn’t even know it’s communication, so not even a security agency would think to intercept it. It would come across as mere noise. Ergo, aliens might be trying to communicate, but their natural communication systems are completely encrypted. So we don’t even notice that this is an alien writing, “Hey, what’s it like being a Tampa Bay Buccanneers’ fan? Isn’t it totally depressing?” Some might wonder whether this is still a touch human-centric. We assume that other beings might have at least some of the same impulses as us, that they would want, for example, to connect, share and even have their own Instagram accounts. However, they could be beings with a completely different chemistry, a completely different sense of being, a completely different definition of the thing we call “life.” (More at source).