Why Edward Snowden should receive the Nobel Peace Prize

I understand it's a very crowded field this year, with many worthy nominations.  Yet I do assert that Edward Snowden should receive the prize, for the following reasons.  With the help of several courageous members of the press, he has done more than any single person to alert the world community, at both the levels of government and the general publics,

1. That the dangers from unrestricted government-sponsored clandestine cyberwar are far more advanced than was previously known by all but a veritable handful of people.

2. That methods used by the U.S. National Security Agency, the world's vaunted premier intelligence-gathering agency, have been wholly inadequate in determining serious threats to the United States and other countries from international terrorist groups.

3. That digital means of communication, on which all modern societies now depend, had been corrupted by a handful of governments in collaboration with computer-related companies.      

4.  That reasonable expectations of privacy by highest-level government officials in democratic countries have not been honored by the United States and a handful of other governments working secretly in concert.      

By all this Edward Snowden has delivered incontrovertible proof that the threat to humanity from aggressive governments is no longer readily perceived in massed armies at national borders but is as silent as carbon monoxide, as pervasive as a computer terminal in a person's home. 

Edward Snowden has also exemplified the conscience that is the best defense of world peace, and which was set forth in Nuremberg Principle IV, on the matter of following superior orders:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Finally, and while I doubt the Nobel Peace Prize committee would consider this is a valid argument, a very personal observation:

I think Winston Churchill would roll in his grave if he saw what had become of the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States of America.  Not that I would dare put words in his mouth, but I believe he would agree that this is not peace through strength, that the situation Edward Snowden exposed is base chicanery managed by men not even fit to command a pickpocket gang.

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