Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the biennial “whistleblower prize” in Germany, worth some $3,900, in recognition of his “bold efforts” to expose the monitoring of communications data by his former employer.
In Snowden’s address on the presentation of the 2013
Whistleblower Award - channeled by internet activist and
journalist Jacob Appelbaum - the former CIA employee said “it
is a great honor to be recognized for the public good created by
this act of whistleblowing.”
However, he acknowledged that “it is not [him], but the public
who has affected this powerful change to abrogation of basic
constitutional rights by secret agencies.”
In his statement, he said that “speaking truth to power has
caused whistleblowers their freedom, family, or country” in
the US due to the country’s “weak legal protections” and “bad
laws that provide no public interest defense.”
“This results in a situation that associates an unreasonably
high price with maintaining the necessary foundation of our
liberal democracy – our informed citizenry,” Snowden said.
“The society that falls into the deterrent trap known in
cultural wisdom as ‘shooting the messenger’ will quickly find
that not only is it without messengers but it no longer enjoys
messages at all.”
The prize, last awarded in 2011, was officially bestowed upon the
30-year-old at a ceremony in Berlin which took place Friday,
prompting a nine-minute congratulatory video message from
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on Saturday.
“If I ran the committee, making the choice of who was to
receive this award, it would take me probably one and a half
seconds at most to have come to the conclusion that he is the
only person deserving of the award this year,” said
Greenwald, who published Snowden's leaks, in the honorific speech
released in response to the news.
“He told me in good conscience that he could not sit by
quietly and allow privacy and Internet freedom to be destroyed
while doing nothing about it.”
Here's the 10-minute address I taped for the Berlin award ceremony where Snowden received 2013 Whistleblower Award http://t.co/fRKcdQRc6H
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 31, 2013
The organizers of the prize commended Snowden’s work, stating
that he had uncovered “massive and unsuspecting monitoring and
storage of communication data, which cannot be accepted in
democratic societies.”
The whistleblower award was first awarded in 1999 under the
auspices of the Association of German Scientists and the German
chapter of the International Association of Lawyers Against
Nuclear Arms (IALANA).
Snowden is credited with releasing details of mass surveillance
operations by US and British intelligence agencies through his
prior connection with the NSA.
It was revealed in June that for seven years, the US National
Security Agency (NSA) has been using PRISM, a warrantless web
surveillance system with a near-limitless ability to spy on
anyone’s phone calls, e-mails, video chats, search history and
more, with major Internet giants Google, Apple and Facebook being
complicit in the scheme.