Edward Snowden Receives Whistleblowing Award

from the with-a-great-acceptance-speech dept

I'm still at a loss as to how people cannot call Ed Snowden a whistleblower , given just how many government abuses his leaks have revealed, and the wider discussion they have created (all without revealing anything that appears to be truly damaging -- just embarrassing). So it's good to see that he received a big whisteblower award in Germany over the weekend. Since he was (obviously) unable to attend in person, Jacob Appelbaum read his acceptance speech , opening it up with a very heartfelt discussion of the type of person that Snowden appears to be. It's worth watching.

You can read Snowden's acceptance speech as well. It's a quick read, but worth it. Here's a snippet:

My gratitude belongs to all of those who have reached out to their friends and family to explain why suspicionless surveillance matters. It belongs to the man in a mask on the street on a hot day and the women with a sign and an umbrella in the rain, it belongs to the young people in college with a civil liberty sticker on their laptop, and the kid in the back of a class in high school making memes. All of these people accept that change begins with a single voice and spoke one message to the world: governments must be accountable to us for the decisions that they make. Decisions regarding the kind of world we will live in. What kind of rights and freedoms individuals will enjoy are the domain of the public, not the government in the dark.



Yet the happiness of this occasion is for me tempered by an awareness of the road traveled to bring us here today. In contemporary America the combination of weak legal protections for whistleblowers, bad laws that provide no public interest defense and a doctrine of immunity for officials who have strayed beyond the boundaries of law has perverted the system of incentives that regulates secrecy in government. This results in a situation that associates an unreasonably high price with maintaining the necessary foundation of our liberal democracy – our informed citizenry. Speaking truth to power has caused whistleblowers their freedom, family, or country.

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It is unfortunate that so many still cannot see what an amazing thing Snowden has done, and how it is clearly whistleblowing against government abuse.

Filed Under: awards, ed snowden, jacob appelbaum, whistleblowing