14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden may not have been chosen as Time’s Person of the Year, but he did make the top of the list of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers for 2013.
The whistleblower managed to send out a formal statement since he couldn’t attend the reception in Washington on Wednesday.
“It’s an honor to address you tonight. I apologize for being unable to attend in person, but I’ve been having a bit of passport trouble. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras also regrettably could not accept their invitations. As it turns out, revealing matters of ‘legitimate concern’ nowadays puts you on the list for more than ‘Global Thinker’ awards,” Snowden says, showing a healthy dose of humor.
The whistleblower believes that it’s not the change in policies that we’re going to remember going on, but rather the changes in the way we think. “In a single year, people from Indonesia to Indianapolis have come to realize that dragnet surveillance is not a mark of progress, but a problem to be solved,” he wrote.
Edward Snowden also believes that even those who remain unconvinced that surveillance technologies have outpaced democratic controls must agree that in democracies, surveillance of the public must be debated by the public. “No official may decide the limit of our rights in secret,” Snowden states.
The whistleblower thanked the Foreign Policy Magazine, as well as the many others that have helped expose the truth and end the silence.
Snowden is currently living in Russia, where he’s been offered temporary asylum following his flea from the United States ahead of the publishing of the first leaked stories in June.
The joke he made about his passport is related to the fact that the United States has canceled his documentation, effectively leaving him stranded in the Russian Sheremetyevo airport, in the transit area, where he spent several weeks.