Whistleblower Edward Snowden has been honoured with the Right Livelihood Award 2014, for revealing the extent of illegal government mass surveillance. His statement can be found on The Courage Foundation’s web site Free Snowden. We congratulate him and this year’s other winners: Alan Rusbridger, Asma Jahangir, Basil Fernando and Bill McKibben.

We must remember that the USA has not been alone in the crimes revealed by Snowden, nor in stopping the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales to search for Snowden.

One who seems not so happy about Snowden is Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, who is reported to have stopped the Right Livelihood Foundation from using the department’s premises. That is perhaps not so surprising, because Carl Bildt appears to have been working closely with the USA for a long time, even co-chaired a lobby group for the Iraq war and was a board member of Booz Allen Hamilton Holdings.