Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Color Purple”, Alice Walker, has come out publicly in support of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, Edward Snowden last week by joining the ‘Thank You, Ed Snowden’ campaign.

The 69-year-old Walker can be seen on the Thank You, Ed Snowden Facebook page Sept. 10 holding a sign that says, “I admire your courage”.

The “Thank You, Ed Snowden” campaign is a project of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) , the Washington, DC-based public interest legal organization fighting for human and civil rights and economic justice issues.

According to the campaign, they are seeking to get 10,000 signatures to put large “Thank You, Ed Snowden” bus advertisements on the outside of Washington, D.C. buses.

The PCJF states, “Ed Snowden’s revelations are tearing down the wall shielding illegal government conduct. Last week, the New York Times and The Guardian wrote major pieces based on Snowden’s exposures confirming what we long suspected: U.S. and British intelligence have, covertly and/or with the approval of Internet and technology companies, inserted secret vulnerabilities or “back doors” into the encryption software we use every day. That includes popular platforms such as Outlook, Skype, Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, and also the software used to protect our banking transactions and medical records.

“Even after the Congress voted down a bill in the 1990s allowing the NSA to insert such “back doors” into our telecommunications, the spy agency went ahead and did it anyway. They spent 10 times more on this operation than on the notorious PRISM program.

“Quietly but steadily, the government has been inverting the principles of democracy. If the precondition for democracy is an informed public, the government has instead been keeping us in the dark. If the essence of democracy is the consent and will of the people, we instead have a government that treats every resident as a potential adversary. Indeed, in the documents just released, “adversary” is the term that the U.S. government used to refer to the general public.

“We are learning far more about the activities of our government from Ed Snowden than we do from those elected to represent us.”