Snowden's 'Alternative' Christmas Message: 'Together We Can End Mass Surveillance'

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has delivered an “alternative Christmas message” on the UK’s Channel 4 in which he says that “a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” and that the kinds of surveillance outlined in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four “are nothing compared to what we have available today.”

Channel 4 has broadcast an annual alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Day address to the UK since 1993.

Snowden gives this year’s address in a video made for Channel 4 by filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras’s Praxis Films.

In the pre-recorded address to be aired on Christmas Day, Snowden says, “Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide, mass surveillance, watching everything we do.”

The kinds of surveillance Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four warned of “are nothing compared to what we have available today,” and a child born today will “never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.”

The lack of privacy matters because it “is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”