In Stockholm, Sweden, the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, has been awarded to five people, including National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden accepted by video link from Russia.
Edward Snowden: “All the prices we’ve paid, all the sacrifices we’ve made, I believe we would do again — I know I would do again, because it was never about me … (inaudible) this is about us, this is about our rights, this is about what kind of societies that we want to live in, the kind of government that we want to have.”
Snowden was honored along with Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian newspaper, which published reports using Snowden’s leaks to expose sweeping NSA surveillance. The other Right Livelihood honorees were Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir, Basil Fernando of the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong and U.S. environmentalist “Bill McKibben”:http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/bill_mckibben, founder of 350.org and a leading voice against climate change.