The whistleblower didn't really have any other choice to get the information out

Dec 27, 2013 10:10 GMT  ·  By
Tim Berners-Lee believes Snowden didn't have any other choice but to share the files publicly
   Tim Berners-Lee believes Snowden didn't have any other choice but to share the files publicly

Tim Berners-Lee, the founding father of the World Wide Web, believes Edward Snowden did the world a favor by leaking the NSA documents.

Berners-Lee has expressed concern over the past few months about the freedom of the Internet, mentioning at one point that the Internet as a whole is being threatened by governments seeking more power. The computer scientist went as far as to join the StopWatching.US coalition that tries to fight against the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.

Now, while he played the part of guest editor on BBC’s Radio 4 Today program, Berners-Lee called Snowden a “really important part of the system” in protecting the Internet.

He admits that Snowden may have broken the law, but he believes that there should be an internationally recognized way to establish whether the whistleblower had any other choice than to do what he did.

The father of the World Wide Web believes that Snowden couldn’t have pursued any other channels because he would have been caught and the information would have never been revealed.

Furthermore, Berners-Lee says that Snowden did everything with the help of a journalist to make sure that some data gets redacted in such a way that it doesn’t harm individuals.

“Has he gone to the trouble of doing it as a journalist or with a journalist to make sure that the data he is putting out there in public is carefully selected so as not to harm individuals, so as not to do unnecessary harm to countries, so as to make the point that he needs to make without doing any more damage?” Berners-Lee said during the radio show.

At the very least, as Snowden admitted in a rare interview, there is now a public debate about surveillance. The whistleblower said that he felt as if he had already won because all he wanted was to give society the necessary information to judge for itself how it wanted to be governed.