Creator of the Web Tim Berners-Lee says whistleblowers like Edward Snowden save society from itself

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told reporters that whistleblowers should be protected rather than punished. Source: News Limited

 

FORMER US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and others like him play an essential role in exposing abuses and should be protected, not punished, the founder of the World Wide Web said today. 

"When checks and balances break down, all society can rely on are the whistleblowers,'' Tim Berners-Lee told reporters, in response to a question on Snowden, who is a fugitive because of the US intelligence files he leaked.

"And because they have been performing this important function of saving society when it is in its most desperate state, therefore we need, I think, to have a form of international recognition for whistleblowers,'' added Berners-Lee.

"I don't think an automatic Nobel prize is necessarily part of that, but some way of generating an amnesty,'' Berners-Lee explained, saying countries should band together to protect those whose leaks "really help humanity and not hurt humanity''.

The files leaked by Snowden have exposed widespread spying by the US National Security Agency and the intelligence services of other countries including Britain, sparking a storm of protest.

Berners-Lee said that checks and balances in the United States and other countries had failed and that it would be "stupid'' to think that reformed systems would be better.

"We must assume that those systems in the future will break down too,'' he said, noting that the importance of whistleblowers would be undiminished.

Berners-Lee conceived the Web almost 25 years ago in his spare time at Geneva-based CERN, Europe's top particle physics lab.

news.com.au 6 December 2013

More to the point also is that the 'whistleblowers' expose the corrupt dealings of governments and corporations, and as a result are hunted down for this action.

The focus is not on the crimes commited by the exposure, but rather the systematic persecution of the whistleblower.

The police are supposed to act on illegal activites irrespective of the source, but instead are run by the corporatocracy to the detriment of society as a whole.

Nobel peace prize should be awarded to whistleblowers and not given to corrupt war mongering politicans or heads of state e.g. Barack Obama (2009), Henry Kissinger (1973), Theodore Roosevelt (1906)