If the committee ignores the will of the US, Snowden may win

Oct 9, 2014 09:46 GMT  ·  By

The Nobel peace prize is going to be announced tomorrow and whistleblower Edward Snowden is running for the honor.

Nominations for Snowden have been pouring in since last year following the first few NSA revelations that ended up in the media.

It seems that analysts estimate that Edward Snowden’s strongest competitors are Pope Francis, as well as Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who campaigns education of girls.

Predicting the winner is usually hard and this year is no different. The Nobel committee has received a record 278 candidates, although not all of their names have been made public.

Snowden's chances at winning

What are Snowden’s chances nowadays? Well that remains to be seen, but not even Snowden himself has much hope for this. During a recent video conference, he told the world from his Russian hideout that it’s unlikely that the Nobel committee would back him winning the Peace prize.

Starting it off, the 30-year-old has taken a big chance with his life last year as he decided to take an unknown number of documents from NSA’s network exposing the mass surveillance apparatus the intelligence agency has developed.

Programs such as PRISM and the metadata collection one have set the world on fire, but they were just the beginning. Latter documents revealed how the NSA cracked open the link between the servers of Google and Yahoo, getting access to unencrypted data, or how the intelligence agency was shamelessly spying on state leaders from around the world, regardless if they were friends or foes.

Many have accused the intelligence agency and the US government of violating people’s basic rights to privacy and free speech, but little has been done to change this. Despite some strong-worded statements from various entities around the world, and promises from the Obama administration that things will change and that NSA’s powers would be limited, nothing has been done so far and legislation meant for this has been stuck in Congress for months.

However way you take it, Snowden has sparked a huge international debate and has put the NSA and its practices under the spotlight, showing everyone that collecting all the hay in the hopes of finding the needle is the wrong way to go.

Politically influenced?

On the other hand, the Nobel prize committee has been accused of being entirely too influenced by politics. Awarding Barack Obama the Peace Price back in 2009 was the tipping point for many who now consider the entire process a sham. At the time the award came in, Obama’s administration was engaged in two conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ever since then, many other similar conflicts have sparked, sending US troops in conflict areas, or the Obama administration has expressed its support for one war zone or another.

It’s not just the media that has pointed to the issues with giving Obama the prize, but also other Nobel Laureates. Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won in 2006, said that the committee’s award was a clear endorsement of Obama and the direction he is taking.

Given this particular statement and other previous ones, Snowden’s chances seem to plummet to the ground. Awarding Snowden with the Peace Prize for everything he’s done would be a hit to the United States who has been trying to discredit the whistleblower at every step, despite the fact that the NSA or the Obama administration have never once said the documents are fake or that what’s in them is fake.

Whether the Nobel Prize Committee will take a stand against human rights violations by the US government remains to be seen.