Greenwald: Good evening to everybody and thank you for so much for that really warm welcome and thank
you as well to the city of Munich and to the
German association of publishers and to the
jury for this really profound award which
I am truly honoured and humbled to receive
When I learned that I had been chosen for
the award I was of course very happy and very
gratified.. I knew the story of Sophie and
Hans Scholl and knew about the award to some
extend but I actually.. my first thought was
that I may not be able to travel to Germany
on the date of the ceremony simply because of scheduling conflicts and on the day that
the award was announced a German friend of mine called me very excited and he said, " Congratulations,
I can't wait to go and see the event!" and
I said, " Well I'm actually thinking about
the possibility that I might not be able to
attend, I really want to but I don't know
if I can." and he was outraged, scandalized
- at even the mere possibility that I was
thinking about not attending and I said, "I
know it's a very prestigious award and I would
love to go but it's just matter of time constraints" and he said, "No you don't understand, it's
not about the prestige of the award, there are a lot of prestigious awards all over the
world and you can't go to every ceremony"
He said, " It's not about that  just spend
an hour online reading about what this prize
is about and what the spirit behind it is,
and you will see that it is the perfect award
for what you and Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden
tried to do in the work that you did." And I
spent 15 minutes reading about the history
of the award and the story behind and the
purpose of why it's awarded and I immediately
knew that there was no choice at all, that
it was mandatory that I come (APPLAUSE)
There has been a lot of attention paid to
the disclosures of these documents, and rightfully
so, we wanted the focus to be on the questions
of surveillance and privacy in the internet
age. But I actually think that there is at
least as important a part of this story, if
not a more important part of the story, and
that is the human lesson that I think can
be learned by looking at the events of the
last 18 months. When I went to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden in June of last year I
had spent several weeks talking to him on
the internet using encryption, so that nobody
could monitor what we were saying, and other
than the fact that I knew he wanted to give
me a huge number of documents that he said proved that the U.S government was illegaly
spying on the world, other than that I knew
nothing about him. I did not know his name.
I did not know where he worked. I did not
know his gender or his age. And I travelled
to Hong Kong with an expectation of who I
was meeting that turned out to be completely
wrong. I had this mental image of who he was
and I had assumed that he must be fairly old,
in part because I figured if somebody was
willing to risk their whole life to expose
this injustice it must be because they have
spent year after year after year after year
witnessing it and just go to the point, where
they were no longer able to stand by and do
I also knew that he was going to risk spending
the rest of his life in prison and I think
without really consciously describing it to
myself I assumed that it's probably easier
to spend the rest of your life in prison if
you're 75 years old rather than 25. It just
seemed natural to me. So when I got to Hong
Kong and I met Edward Snowden for the first
time, I say this without exaggeration, it
was probably the most confusing and disorienting
event in my entire life. There before me was
not a hardened veteran of the American National
Security state but a kid, I mean he was 29
years old but he looked at least 5 or 6 years
younger. He was wearing a white T-shirt and
jeans and was very thin. He hadn't left the
hotel room for at least 3 weeks so he was
very pale. He looked like the average nerd
that you see in a shopping mall or on a college
campus and when I sat down with him and started
asking him about his life, it became even
more amazing to me. It wasn't just that he
was so young, it was that he was so ordinary.
He was somebody who grew basically poor. He
had no power or prestige of any kind. He didn't
come from a well connected or wealthy family
with influence, quite the opposite, he was
completely ordinary in every way. He didn't
even finish high school .... and yet here
was this person completely ordinary in every
way prepared to do something so extraordinary.
We in Hong Kong assumed... we were almost
certain that Edward Snowden's future was going
to be sitting in a cage, in an American prison,
by himself for the rest of his life. No prison
is a good place to be but an American prison
when you are accused of endangering national
security is one of the worst places to be.
That was the assumption on which we were operating.
Now that was extraordinary enough that he
was willing to risk going to prison for the
rest of his life at the age of 29. But what
was even more amazing to me and this is something
that influenced everything that I did in the
work that I was able to do and it will influence
the rest of my life - there was never a single
moment, not one moment, when Edward Snowden
exhibited any slight fear or hesitation or
remorse about what he had done. Even when
we thought we were hours away from having
people knock on the hotel room, where we were
working to take him away - even when the U.S
government made him the number 1 fugitive
of the world's most powerful government - they were so desperate to get him that they actually
forced a plane carrying the president of Bolivia to land in Austria, that's how crazy the U.S
government was to get him, EVEN when all of that was happening there was never a moment
where he thought to himself or showed
maybe I did something I shouldn't have done. And I spend 4 or 5 of the first days when
I was in Hong Kong doing very little other
than trying to understand what would cause
somebody at the age of 29, with a seemingly
happy and fulfilled life, he had a very good
job, he was making a lot of money, he had
a girlfriend who loved him and a family who
supported him, he was willing, in fact eager
to throw all of that away simply in defence
of a political ideal. He was willing to risk
sitting in a cage for the next 40 or 50 years
in order to combat this injustice and I wanted to understand why that was and what he ultimately
told me and it took a long time for me to
understand it, he said that based on his view
of himself and ethics and morality and his
duties as a human being, that if he had to
spend the rest of life knowing that he had
confronted this extreme injustice and had
the opportunity to stand up to it but chose
not to because of fear, he said, "the pain
of having to live with that knowledge, the
pain of having that sit on his concious would
be so much worse than anything the American government could do to him" and that is why he did it.
Now one of the things that I've thought about
a lot over the past 18 months is that although
that seemed remarkable to me at the time it's actually fairly common. If you look at how
injustice is confronted throughout history,
not just in the United States, but almost
in every part of the world, you'll find that
it's essential the Edward Snowdens: People
who are ordinary, who have no particular power or position or prestige, who take it upon
themselves to risk everything in order to
fight the tyranny or the injustice that they
see... it's people like Rosa parks, the ordinary African American women who refused to sit
at the back of the bus or it's a street vendor
in Tunisia, who sets himself on fire and sparks
a extraordinary revolution against the worst tyrannies in the Arab world or it's kids like
Sophie and Hans Scholl, who for whatever reason risk their own lives knowingly in order to
confront one of the worst injustices human
history has ever know and the thing that I've
given a lot of thought to over the past 18
months is that we all have that in us, there's
a reason why ordinary people are able and
willing to take such extraordinary acts, it's
just matter of spending time thinking about
what really matters in life, what it is that
actually makes us happy - the value of having a clean concious in knowing that you have done the right thing.
and the reason I am so honoured to receive this award in particular.
it is because this is an award that is devoted to asking us to think about those very issues, and the more
people think about those questions, the more Rosa Parks and Edwards Snowdens and Sophie
Scholls there will be - that was probably the
biggest lesson that I learned in doing this
work - the lesson is that COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS.
(APPLAUSE)
Whenever I talk to Laura about the work that
we ended up doing, we think back to that time in Hong Kong, which was so intense and entailed
so many different decisions and ultimately
I think what we realize now more than anything
else, is that we almost really didn't have
any decision at all. When we saw this 29 year
old in total anonymity, willing to take the
biggest risks you can take as a human being
we knew we had the obligation to do this work
in the same spirit that animated him, and
we knew we were going to be threatened with prosecution by the U.S Government. We knew
there was a chance that we wouldn't be able to go back to the United States for a good
long time, if ever, we knew that things would happen like having our internet communications
surveilled and monitored and having the people closest to us like my partner detained and
targeted and we felt like we had no choice
- the spirit of courage that Edward Snowden
displayed infected us and that in turn infected journalists at the Guardian and journalists at
Der Spiegel and journalists all over the world who worked on these materials without any
fear of any kind and this ultimately is to
me is the biggest lesson, which is, you know
I've been writing about politics for 10 years
now and it's very easy sometimes for people
when they look at some kind of an injustice
by a powerful government like the United States
to rell themselves," Well there is nothing I really can do, I don't have enough power, I don't really
have the ability to stand up to this" and
I think the acts of people like Edward Snowden
and Sophie-Hans Scholl and so many other people prove how false that really is.
The lesson of history is that any kind of
injustice, any institution build by human
beings can be confronted and resisted and
torn down and destroyed by other human beings
if the will and the moral courage is summoned
and that's a lesson that I think none of us
should ever forget.
(APPLAUSE)
So I just like to make one last point about
the lesson that I think can be drawn from
the incredible courage of the Scholl siblings.
I think there is some kind of a resistance
sometimes to drawing lessons for contemporary
society from heroism or resistance of the
Nazi era, there is a tendency to think, well
that is a singular evil and we shouldn't really make comparisons and maybe there is some sense
in which that is true. But the only way that
those kinds of acts do have meaning is if
(when) we draw lessons from them. And I think there's also a sense that there is something
maybe inappropriate about comparing resistance
done in the face of a regime like Nazi Germany
to resistance that is done in the context
of Western democracies, and I have to say
that I find that idea, that there is something
inappropriate about comparing those things
to be really quite invalid. I think that's
it's really worth asking first of all to recognize
that democracies are capable of all kinds
of horrible acts. The regime that the Scholls
confronted was a regime ushered-in in the
first instance through a democratic election
- but I think it's worth asking "what do we
mean when we talk about democracy" , " is
it simply that every 3 or 4 years citizens
are able to go into some box and press a button
and pick the person that they want to have
political power?" I think democracy means
a lot more than that. The people in Egypt
were able, three months ago, to go and press
a button for the person they wanted to have political power, people in Gaza were able to do that
when they voted for Hamas. People in
Afghanistan just did that when they elected
a new government. I don't think any of us
would say that those are really democracies.
Democracy requires more than that. At the
very least, at the very least, what democracy
requires if it's going to be more than just
a symbol or a word, is that we as citizens
know about what the most important acts are
that the people in political power are doing.
It has to be an informed choice in order for
it to be meaningful and one of the things
that has happened in my country, the United
States, but also it's closest allies in the
UK and Canada, and Australia and I think even
to other E.U states, is that the fear of terrorism has been exploited to justify an abandonment
of those principles. What was most amazing to me in reading through these Snowden documents
for the first time, was not just how vast
and comprehensive the spying was, the fact
that there were billions of e-mails, billions
of e-mails and telephone calls being collected
and stored every single day. That wasn't even
the most stunning part of it to me, what was
more stunning was that my government and the
British government and three other governments
in New Zealand, Australia and Canada that
called themselves democracies had done all
of this without any disclosure, any knowledge
on the part of the citizens. Now you can have
debates about what details should be kept
secret, what technical term should be concealed,
but I can't imagine that there is anybody
who would say that governments have the right
to do something this significant, to turn
the internet into a realm of unprecedented
monitoring and control, and to do so without
any democratic debate, any disclosure, any
knowledge on the part of the citizens, who
are supposed to exercise informed consent.
And the reason that Edward Snowden came forward,
and the reason that we decided to do the work
that we did in such an aggressive manner was
because we knew that this system was not just
a threat to privacy but a threat to democracy
itself and we wanted to do what I think journalism
is supposed to be about, which is blowing
a massive hole in the wall of secrecy behind which the world's most power governments are
operating and I am thrilled and excited, as
I know is Edward Snowden, that the work we
have done has created a global debate, not
just about surveillance and privacy but about
secrecy and government abuse of power and the proper role of journalism and it has caused
human beings for the first time in the digital age to think about the power of the internet
and what it can be if it is free and compare
it to the weapon of oppression and control
that it can become when if it's not free and
I don't know the outcome of that debate. I
don't know what the internet will become.
But what I do know is that as result of the
work that we've been able to do over the past 18 months that decision will be made by all
of us in the open, and I can't imagine there
is anybody who thinks it should be any other
way so with that I thank you again very much for coming and thank you so much  to
the prize award and the jury for giving me
this prize. Thank you so much!!!
(APPLAUSE)
