It has been almost three years since Edward Snowden leaked classified documents taken from the National Security Agency in Hawaii. Since he left the United States, first going to Hong Kong then to Moscow where the Russian government has granted him a three-year asylum. He is currently residing in an undisclosed location in Russia.

This past weekend, Oct. 22, Snowden made a guest appearance via Skype call to the National Journalism Convention that was being held at the Grand Hyatt, in Washington D.C. There he spoke to hundreds of journalism students and advisers. Every seat was filled and students began sitting on the floor and even spilling into the hallway.

Snowden spoke for about an hour mostly recounting what happened and some of the repercussions it’s had for him. Then he moved on to how his leaks affect journalists and journalism in general. Whenever anyone is dealing with extremely sensitive information like this, it can really impact them and the people around them. It plays the same on each level whether it is reporting against a school, business or even the government; whistle blowers always take a risk. When Snowden first spoke to his contacts at The Guardian he didn’t reveal who he was to them until months after.

Snowden also warned about how dangerous the National Security Agency has become by explaining to the crowd “ For the first time in history, we no longer have teams tracking an individual, we have individuals tracking teams.”

The speech transitioned into some questions posed by the moderator with things like “Can you tell us where you are located?” and “Do you have any plans moving forward?” Both of those questions were answered with a ‘no’.

The final part of the event was open to student questions. The questions, however, were not pre-screened therefore, a lot of questions were repeatedly asked or questions were asked in which the answers were stated previously in the speech. Occasionally a question would stick because there was a long-winded explanation before the question was even stated.

Once the questions started becoming repetitive or took on a competitive approach among other peers also asking questions, trying to one-up each other to Snowden, I took my leave.

The entirety of the speech was extremely informative about how and why Snowden made the choices that he did and how it had affected him. Hopefully in the future he will be able to be more open in his speeches and perhaps make more appearances.