Tonight at the Crunchies, Edward Snowden’s massive leak of NSA material won the Biggest Social Impact category.
Besting rivals like Code.org and CrowdTilt, Snowden’s successful efforts to demask the mass surveillance undertaken by the National Security Administration on both global and United States citizens has ignited a worldwide discussion surrounding privacy and the proper role of government.
That Snowden won, therefore, is no surprise. This is doubly true among the tech-heavy bent of Crunchies voters. The technology industry itself has been a target of the NSA’s work through programs like PRISM and others. MUSCULAR, an NSA effort to tap the data lines between Google datacenters on foreign soil, is just one example of how tech companies have come under the larger cloud of the state.
Naturally, Snowden wasn’t able to pick up the award in person.
Other groups nominated in the category were StopWatching.Us, a protest group against surveillance; Code.org, an effort to help kids learn to code; CrowdTilt, a group funding tool; and Watsi, a crowdfunding platform working to bring healthcare to the underprivileged.
The pace of revelations from the Snowden trove has slowed in recent weeks, but the impact of what he shook loose from the United States government has led to government inquiry, lawsuits and just, perhaps, real coming change.