Snowden Shortlisted For Europe's Top Human Rights Award

another random user sends this news from the BBC: "Edward Snowden, the fugitive American former intelligence worker, has made the shortlist of three for the Sakharov prize, Europe's top human rights award. Mr Snowden was nominated by Green politicians in the European Parliament for leaking details of U.S. surveillance. Nominees also include Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head for demanding education for girls. Former recipients of the prize, awarded by the European Parliament, include Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. Mr Snowden's nomination recognized that his disclosure of U.S. surveillance activities was an 'enormous service' to human rights and European citizens, the parliament's Green group said."

Comments

Comparative sacrifice

[themushroom]

Malala gets this one hands-down. Both made very important statements we must pay attention to, but a fucking headshot beats hanging out in a Russian airport IMHO.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like you'd actually ask to be shot in the head to prove your worth. I could get shot trying to tie my shoelace, doesn't mean I worked harder than Snowden.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[Nemesisghost]

It's not like you'd actually ask to be shot in the head to prove your worth.

No, but it takes a lot more guts to stand up to armed gunmen for what you believe in than run away where they can't get you. She might not have chosen to take a bullet to the head, but she did choose to confront the cowards & show the world what they truly are and risk her life doing so. Unlike what some would like, Snowden only risked life behind bars.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[timeOday]

That's the problem with this kind of award, it turns it into a contest which seems rather gauche. "Oh yeah, well this person got shot in the head, beat that!"

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[girlintraining]

because both seemed like self-serving political statements to me, but on reflection, ...

On reflection, all awards are self-serving political statements.

It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did, or the barely-controlled shitstorm that Assange supervised.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people get up-modded these days for using toilet humor while discussing serious topics of global relevance.

In the same vein, the leak, while angering many Americans, should be a huge benefit for citizens of every country, both outside the US, but also inside. A great gain for Europeans, as far as awareness of human rights issues.

The leak by itself accomplishes nothing; The activities disclosed had already happened by then, and the damage done. And there is little evidence to date that the leaks have dampened the spirits of those under scrutiny to engage in similar behavior. Knowledge, understanding, intelligence, and awareness only enables action; It does not, by itself, constitute action. In truth, one of mankind's oldest delusions is belief that an enhanced understanding of the problem will necessarily lead to that problem being fixed. Snowden may have pointed out that the United States is behaving trashy... but we have yet to find someone willing to take out the trash.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[kruach aum]

This is a human rights prize, not a guts prize. Utilitaristically, Snowden has done a lot more for a lot more people than Malala Yousafzai.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[AlphaWolf_HK]

The leak accomplishes a lot. Maybe not in the short term, but in the long term it is causing us to take a much greater look at security that will not only prevent NSA style spying, but very easily could further harden the global cloud infrastructure at large against data breaches. Namely, if we go out of our way to secure our information against even those who have physical access to it, then it makes it that much harder for somebody else to get a hold if it as well, legally or not.

Something as big as this, hitting something as well established as what we already have, isn't going to change overnight or even over a year: This could take up to a decade because we're not only looking at software changes, but also hardware changes in a big ocean of already existing datacenters.

What I'm thinking of is data storage akin to mega where only the end user holds the keys. Others are already working on their own variants of this same concept, only they're trying to do so in such a way that makes content manipulation possible while leaving the data secured. Yes, I'm aware of the possible exploit of the website feeding you a bogus javascript page that steals your keys, however that can be fixed.

And by the way, I don't think he was upmodded for toilet humor, rather the message just happened to contain it. Besides, toilet humor has its place, and I think it's suitable here. If it offends you, you should probably disconnect from the internet and go live in a tree somewhere.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[GameboyRMH]

Was going to say the same thing, it's horrible that Malala got shot in the face but this isn't a Suffering At the Hands of Tyrants Award AFAIK.

And leaking proof that the NSA is spying on everyone on the planet and making a mockery of the US legal system > saying inspiring things in the name of women's education in a particular region of the middle east. Sorry.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[Tom]

Malala gets this one hands-down.

If that happens, the spectacle has officially won. Someone saying something that's a brave thing to say and getting an unusually extreme reaction to it isn't even on the same scale as someone revealing a world-wide illegal conspiracy affecting pretty much everyone in the civilized world.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[umafuckit]

Snowden was and continues to be at far higher risk of assassination than Malala.

I don't think that's true. At this point Snowden being free is just embarrassing to the US. He's apparently already given the press everything he knows so killing him isn't going to improve anything from the NSA's perspective. On the other hand, if Snowden meets with a peculiar "accident" then the US government just comes out of it looking bad. Malala, on the other hand, is more than just an embarrassment to the extremists who shot her. She has chosen to remain vocal for her cause and therefore represents a continuing threat because she acts a nucleation site for the more liberal attitudes they are seeking to suppress.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[Dasher42]

I'd have to say education is a much more important, more fundamental right than phone/internet privacy. The damage done to people and societies by preventing girls from going to school is much greater than the NSA reading their emails.

It's not just privacy. It's the right not to be scrutinized by an agency of a government that calls its own dissenting citizens who speak out about oil spills, bloody wars on false pretenses, dangerous chemical pollution, or corruption "terrorists". It's a right to have a voice and dignity and due process in a law-abiding country instead of being tampered with and manipulated by bought politicians serving as the lackeys of their for-profit corporate donors.

This ties into every issue anywhere that the NSA and related agencies project power, and that's all over the globe. It's everywhere a grassroots needs to step up to a corporate/government/financial juggernaut about anything, including the women in school in Pakistan.

This government will give everything you've sent or received through your phone or your laptop to a foreign agency with at most a rubber stamp from a court that the public knows nothing about, but will - yes - hand the educational system of America over to predatory lenders and ensconced social elites rather than earnest teachers and staff.

The government that is invading privacy is also denying your right to know about what is in your food and your medicine. Seen the recent headline about Bayer? This same government that has invaded all of our privacy still guarded Bayer's secrecy when its medication for hemophiliacs was infected with HIV and has thus allowed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to be infected, to protect Bayer's profits at the cost of lives.

This government will record your every call, but it won't prosecute the banks which shredded the world's economy and have illegally foreclosed homes - some of which were owned by people who'd bought them with cash with no bank involved, ever, for "lack of evidence."

And yes, this government will send drones over skies foreign and domestic, and without due process fire missiles, napalm, chemicals, and bullets made of radioactive waste into civilian areas all over the planet, including Pakistan. Schools count, but imagine going to school where the missiles can fall arbitrarily. It will call the instigators of these crimes leaders, and the whistleblowers traitors, and use these privacy-invading tools to manipulate people and hunt down those who step out of line.

This government will protect Wall Street while infiltrating dissenting movements with psy-ops and undercover agitators who generate the props for cheap propaganda to justify gestapo tactics in a supposedly free country, and use its surveillance tools to know better how to deliver its deceitful war. PRISM is an abuse of power meant to help politicians abuse even more power at will.

Malala and Snowden have both done awesome things in the face of power that would crush them and kill them and then lie to the public about the whole matter, and it'd be stupid to compare their personal level of heroism. I mean, some of us might only get the clear opportunity to get a cat out of a tree, whatever our merit. Snowden got a chance to expose an oppressor of a much more central and global nature. That's what makes his arena more widely significant, and I think that deserves consideration.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[PrimaryConsult]

But without the leak, how would anyone even think action would need to take place? Acting on the information without revealing it would have guaranteed a stamp of "terrorist crackpot" and maybe a 3rd page article in a few papers. Would you rather small groups of people randomly taking action on suspicions and assumptions all of the time? Meaningful action requires being well informed.

Yes leaking by itself accomplishes nothing, but how much on this front be accomplished without the leak?

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Right, because clearly if nobody ever revealed anything about the NSA spying, we'd still magically know about it anyways and we'd already be taking countermeasures.

Seriously, how can you be so stupid? The speaking is what inspired people to act. We didn't simply attack the British troops and say "there, we're separate now." Works like "Common Sense" from people like Thomas Paine, as well as numerous other acts of speaking are what inspired the colonists to rebel, and it didn't just all magically happen in one day; the events leading up to the revolution spanned years before it was officially declared. And I especially like how you throw the constitution in there, because it wasn't ratified for a good 12 years until after we declared independence (prior to that the US was a confederacy.) Really, get a clue dude, or at the very least stop arguing just for the sake of arguing, which is what all of your posts seem to do.

The Snowden leaks are leading to a big change - it just isn't happening overnight.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Get your head screwed on straight: Personal privacy is an issue, but it's not a priority and it doesn't trump more basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing -- and we need those right now. A lot of people need them. We are now coming up on year SEVEN and economists estimate that unemployment levels won't return to pre-recession levels for ANOTHER seven years. Don't tell me Snowden matters. Don't tell me the NSA is important. We have hungry people out there. Hungry, desperate, unemployed people.

Justice delayed is justice denied. There's no reason why this can't be addressed at the moment either. On top of that; lack of food, shelter and clothing aren't exactly a major problem in the US - this is nothing more than a red herring because you're just another one of those who believes that privacy is unimportant. If you did think it was important, you wouldn't be trivializing it in the face of an issue that has little to no bearing on American citizens. (Failing that, then it's as I stated earlier: You argue just to argue.)

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[mjwx]

You seem to have missed the point.

Your rebuttal seems to have demonstrated how surveillance technologies, mostly in the hands of private entities have aided after the event

The GGP implied that government surveillance did not stop events like these. In particular, the NSA surveillance.

Boston Marathon bombing
Caught with the assistance of a multitude of surveillance cameras in the area.

Who owned the cameras, Boston PD, businesses and private entities in Boston or the NSA?

Sarin Gas attack by Syria
Thanks to real-time satellite intelligence over the middle east, we were able to not only spot the attack, but able to warn local health care of the impending crisis.

This is a tenuous link at best. A very long bow to draw. In reality it probably did SFA to help the victims given the limited humanitarian resources in the area and the fact they were in a war zone.

But again it did not do anything to stop the attack. Further more, this is the CIA's regular duties of foreign surveillance that proves no value in the NSA's domestic surveillance.

School shooting rampages
Cameras in schools have allowed us to quickly identify attackers and separate facts from fiction.

Again, how were the attacks stopped by government surveillance?

And again, who owned the cameras?

9/11
1000 killed by car bombs in Iraq in September alone
One Drug Killing every half hour in Mexico

Here you've cited a lack of surveillance. When the NSA surveillance fails to foil the most poorly planned mass shooting how will more cameras and wiretaps help here? The simple answer is that it wont. In fact, all you've managed to show is that surveillance is only good after the fact and wont help in stopping an attack. The car bombs in Iraq are a direct result of the US removing a oppressive yet stable government which was, whilst brutal managed to keep the various ethnic and religious groups from fighting. School and mass shootings are a cultural problem and can only be stopped by fixing the culture around guns. Domestic killings can only be solved by better police work. Tapping the phones of every American and putting cameras on every street corner wont fix a damn thing. There is practically a camera on every corner as it is when we count private security cameras but footage is only useful after the fact, before the fact you rely on tip offs and good old fashioned investigative police work to follow up those tips.

Finally, attacks like 9/11 are stopped in two ways, stop acting like giant dicks. It is a well known and oft proven fact that people who like you are less likely to attack you. This also reduces the workload on number 2, identify your potential enemies and keep tabs on them. There's no point in surveilling everyone, you get so much useless information about who had what for lunch that useful clues are overlooked and lost. Re read that last sentence, it's the biggest reason the NSA hasn't and wont do any good.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[sFurbo]

The NSA and other law enforcement agencies around the world are using these technologies to good effect.

How do we know that? All we have is the words of people who have been found to lie about, well, everything that we can check. The reasonable assumption is that they lie about everything that we can't check, too. They could easily tell us something that can be checked, such as pointing to a foiled terrorist attack, and explaining how mass surveillance helped foil it.

We shouldn't throw that away because the early incarnations of the administration and use of these technologies is flawed.

Part of what keeps the system in check will always be rules. Rules are pointless if they are not followed. If people believe they will never be punished for breaking the rules, it will be much harder to make them follow the rules. If we don't punish people who have broken the rules we have now, how are you going to convince people that they will be punished for breaking rules in the future?

(Failing that, then it's as I stated earlier: You argue just to argue.)

Ad hominid.

Wouldn't that be a commentary on the species as a whole?

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[EuclideanSilence]

Words and ideas are the most powerful thing in the Universe, more powerful than the strongest standing army. As someone's sig here says, "the tyrant fears a laugh more than a bullet."

Re: ...lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The girl from Pakistan, unlike Snowden, has received zero money for her deeds.

As it is said...

[djupedal]

Awards are for those that need them.

Pissing off the US Govt. may mean that Snowden is happy with that and anything else is just gravy. . .

Re:he should get

[Thry]

You know how you look down on those foreign types being all clueless and blindly believing in their corrupt governments and dear leaders? Well everyone's looking down on you for the same reasons :)

Re:ITS A TRAP!!!!

[Gavagai80]

Who cares if he's a martyr to some? There's no revolution coming out of it. What matters to the government is that his imprisonment shows future NSA contractors that they can't get away with leaking.

Snowden should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

[jcr]

Maybe that way the Nobel prize committee could undo some of the damage to the prize's reputation that they caused by giving it to shitheads like Arafat and Obama.

-jcr

Re:Snowden should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Being a shithead does not and should not preclude you from getting the Peace Prize. Arafat arguably deserved to share it with Perez and Rabin for trying to work towards peace in the Middle East, putting aside politics, some of their own previously held beliefs as well as the express wishes of large parts of their constituents (who would prefer to rain fiery death upon the enemy). Even if nothing came of this in the end, this did merit a nomination and (I think) winning the Prize as well.

In contrast, Obama had done fuck all before receiving the Prize. His most relevant achievement at the time was to be Not Dubya. He also managed to be the first black president of the US, which is noteworthy but in itself hardly something to award a Peace Prize for

Re:Snowden should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Uberbah]

Considering that Arafat walked away from a deal with Rabin that met all of the PLO's demands I think he was really more concerned about maintaining a legacy as a freedom fighter rather than face the possibility of actually advancing that goal and becoming a lackuster first president of Palestine.

Consider that's Zionist revisionist history. Arafat was willing to make huge concessions to Israel, letting them keep a great deal of land illegally sized in the 1967 war. Israel kept moving the goalposts on the peace deal until it fell apart.

Because Israel doesn't want peace, it wants land and complete military dominance in the region. It's why Bibi is running around right now threatening Iran for having the nuclear weapons program his own minister of defense says Iran doesn't have.

Re:Snowden should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

[GauteL]

For what it is worth, the grandparent probably went too far. But it seems pretty clear Israel don't want any peace with the Palestinians. If they really wanted peace, they wouldn't continuously make that peace harder and harder to achieve, by creating settlements further and further into the occupied territories. They know they are winning and are showing no sign of wanting to stop.

Asylum?

[JimTheta]

Boy, that will really send a message to the US.

You know what else would send a message? Asylum.

But if no one's feeling that bold, I'm sure the award will really pick Eddie's spirits up during the Russian winter.

Re:Asylum?

[Livius]

You know what else would send a message?

An EU member giving Snowden asylum and the CIA *still* finding a way to put him in Guantanamo or some other concentration camp. That's the reason it's better for Snowden not to even be offered asylum by any country too close to the Americans.

Re:Martyr is not preferable but it happens

[girlintraining]

Had the Taliban successfully

You missed my point. When we're discussing a human rights award, it should be on the merits of the actions they took, not the consequences they suffered. It doesn't matter whether she took one bullet, or five hundred, or none at all, or whether she lived, or died. She stood up against an injustice and that is what is being rewarded... not that she couldn't get out of the way fast enough, or they were better armed, etc.

To say that taking a bullet somehow makes your action more noble than the guy sitting next to you doing the same thing, but not getting hit by the bullet, is a slap in the face to both people with fast reflexes, and every soldier who watched their buddy get turned into hamburger and thought: "Holy shit, that could have been me." The guy that got hamburgered signed up for the same thing as the guys that made it back. They had the same job. The same training. That's what makes is so damned hard to live with -- survivors guilt. There isn't a reason why it should have been him instead of you. Maybe some physics about artillery shells or some other abstract thing of no comfort... but the fact is, there wasn't a deliberate choice. Sometimes bad shit just happens to people. Getting fucked over doesn't earn you an award: Taking the risk of losing everything for a chance at doing good does.

Re:controlled and targetted?

[Anonymous Coward]

PRISM, purposefully weakening encryption, putting backdoors in products sold domestically, etc. seems to cover their actions against US citizens.

The damage that Mr. Snowden has done to the American intelligence community is incalculable and WILL cost lives going forward.

Bullshit. That was claimed about Manning's leak. But then it was acknowledged that no one had any actual evidence that anyone was actually harmed by it.

The sentencing hearing began with testimony from retired Brigadier General Robert Carr, who in 2010 led an emergency Pentagon review into the impact of leaked war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although the mass leak "hit us in the face" the review did not find any evidence that civilians named in the secret files had then been targeted by militants, Gen Carr said.

but I'm having a hard time seeing how leaking information about NSA's operations against China (just to pick one, there are others...) is anything but providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.

Bullshit. Even James Clapper says otherwise:

As loath as I am to give any credit for what has happened here, which is egregious, some of the conversations that it has generated, some of the debate, is probably needed. So if there's a good side to this, maybe that's it.
Transparency of course is a double-edged sword. It's great for us, great for our citizens. But of course the adversary goes to school on that transparency too. But I'm convinced we have to err on the side of more transparency because, most importantly, we won't have any of this if we don't have the trust and confidence of citizens and their elected representatives.

And other quotes:

Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of British intelligence service MI6, suggests of the leaks that they were “very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate” but that while embarrassing the impact may not have been particularly great as “I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn't know already or could have inferred.” He also suggests that Germany and other US allies have not been as outraged as they have seemed “The tears that have been shed internationally have been of the crocodile variety” so there is unlikely to be any reduction in ties between their intelligence agencies.

Stop believing the fear mongering nonsense told to you by people who only stand to gain power, favor and/or financial rewards by furthering these surveillance dragnets.

Props to the Green Party

[DrEasy]

There's been a political vacuum when it comes to defending Snowden and more generally people's right to privacy. Good for Green politicians for showing their concern! There are many more orphan causes in search for a party to pick them up: copyright and patent law reform, standing up to lobbies, etc. They'd get my vote.