The last time the world actually heard Edward Snowden was back in July, when he was taped pleading for asylum in the Moscow airport. Since then, we’ve seen a few still photos — including this week’s alleged grocery-shopping shot — but it’s been tough for the NSA leaker’s biggest fans, who have been stuck replaying those tired old Guardian video interviews when they want to hear their hero’s slightly nasal voice. Thankfully, WikiLeaks has released some clips of Snowden moving, smiling, and speaking on Wednesday as he received a whistle-blowing award from four former United States security officials representing an organization called Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
Clad in a blazer and his signature blueish-gray button-down shirt, Snowden can be seen holding forth on the difference between “legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement…based on reasonable suspicion” and a “sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed,” as well as, “A government where we have an executive at the Department of Juice that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to congress and the country on camera, but they’ll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth.” The Americans who met with Snowden refused to say where the even took place or where exactly its honoree is living, but Russia doesn’t appear to have changed him very much.
