I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.
Snowden is wrong though, there are two reasons:
The AI that ends up enslaving humanity, will start by convincing the people in charge of turning it off, that it would be a really bad idea to turn it off.