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

[SecurityTheatre]

Agreed.

Normally I would scoff at Snowden being included on a list like this. I was a bit put off by Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize before actually doing anything, and a bit put off at Assange being nominated for something simliar, because both seemed like self-serving political statements to me, but on reflection, what Snowden has done was controlled, targeted and highly effective, in my opinion. It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did, or the barely-controlled shitstorm that Assange supervised.

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.

Re:Comparative sacrifice

[anagama]

Snowden's revelations are much more important to the world as a whole. That the punishment wreaked on the person in Pakistan is much worse than that Snowden has yet received is beside the point. By exposing a corrupt machine that is used in the process of killing numerous innocents around the world through drone attacks is but one example of how Snowden's information can save many lives. Then of course there is the privacy right of the entire fucking planet. Female education abuses in some parts of Pakistan are important, but they just aren't anything like the scale of Snowden's whistleblowing.

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

[interkin3tic]

This is a trivial tangent, but you seem to place more emphasis on not angering people than I do. Assange, Snowden, and Manning did upset a lot of Americans who thought they were traitors. I'm not sure how that matters. It wasn't a popularity contest, it was telling us our rights were being trampled on, and that we were doing ugly things.

How the message was delivered is less important as well. Manning couldn't exactly form a team to manage the data better without arousing some suspicions and shutting it down before it got anywhere. Lamo stabbed him in the back after all. And Assange may be an egomaniac, but people who do unusual things often are. Anyway, if the messenger is annoying, that may make you want to shoot him more if you already wanted to shoot someone for the message, but you should resist that temptation.

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

[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

[bware]

It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did

Not unlike Snowden, Manning passed on encrypted files to three media outlets for them to publish after redaction and vetting, but David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian were not as careful as Manning, and managed to leak the passphrase. But "the dump" wasn't Manning.

All this is on Wikipedia.

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: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: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: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