In this video, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald accepts Integrity Media’s “Excellence in Journalism Award” while also paying tribute to whistleblowers around the world. At the heart of his speech is the question of what drives people to risk their careers, their security and, in extreme cases, even their freedom in order to bring secret information into the public domain.
Greenwald reflects on some of the most prominent whistleblowers of recent decades and recalls in particular his 2013 encounter with Edward Snowden. He also places Julian Assange among those whose courage and personal sacrifices form part of a much broader story. What drives people to risk everything despite the threat of prosecution and imprisonment — and what role do whistleblowers play in exposing government misconduct and abuses of power that might otherwise remain hidden?
This video was produced by System Update and published on Glenn Greenwald’s YouTube channel on September 23, 2025. We translated it into German and are republishing it today to encourage public debate on this issue in Germany and beyond.
To read the transcript of this video: Glenn Greenwald: Snowden, Assange and the Price of Truth
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Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, and the author of several bestsellers, including No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (2014) and Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil (2021). Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America’s top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and a co-founder and former editor at The Intercept, which he left in 2020 to launch his own show System Update on Rumble.
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