"Information gathering by companies and agencies has become ubiquitous", says professor Tanja Lange, the main organizer of the event. "Surveillance makes everyone less secure. Thieves are stealing information from one centralized database after another. Government agencies are so focused on mass surveillance that they would rather have everyone vulnerable than everyone secure."

The symposium features six to eight invited talks covering technical as well as legal and political aspects of security and surveillance. Invited speakers include Jacob Appelbaum, security researcher and journalist; Daniel J. Bernstein, cryptologist at University of Illinois at Chicago and TU/e; Communications Strategist for Bits of Freedom Daphne van der Kroft, and Turing Prize winning Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir.