Edward Snowden delivered a Christmas message to the British public and everyone whose governments he has revealed secrets about.
Britain’s Channel 4 has an annual tradition of broadcasting an “Alternative Christmas Message” – alternative to the annual televised message from Queen Elizabeth II.
Snowden’s yuletide address featured more George Orwell than comfort and joy.
“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” Snowden said in the 103-second video, reportedly shot by film maker Laura Poitras*, who helped break the story about the U.S. National Security Agency‘s mass phone records collection program back in June.
“They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves – an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And, that’s a problem because privacy matters,” he said. “Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”
Snowden referred to Orwell warning about mass surveillance “watching everything that we do.”
In a ruling last week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon also called the NSA bulk phone data collection program “Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional. He also granted a preliminary injunction against further gathering of phone records.
Snowden, living in Russia after being granted temporary asylum, has for the past six months revealed a trove of classified NSA documents he obtained while working for intelligence consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
The TV address follows a lengthy interview with the Washington Post this week – reportedly the first in-person interview he has done since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August.
READ MORE: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘The mission’s already accomplished’
“He didn’t want to be in the spotlight, which is why he stayed off television for the past six months,” said journalist Glenn Greenwald, who co-authored the original NSA exposé along with Poitras and has published a continuing series of stories based on Snowden’s leaks.
Greenwald told CNN Snowden wished to focus on his work, exposing the surveillance activities of the U.S. and its surveillance partners in the Five Eyes alliance – Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
READ MORE: Presidential task force urges sweeping limits on government spying
Greenwald also brushed off the criticisms of Snowden and told CNN the stories that have come out of the leaks were not strategically timed. He said a great deal of analysis of the documents has to be completed before a story can be published.
“I think there has been a lot of misinformation disseminated about Edward Snowden,” Greenwald said, attributing it to embarrassed governments.
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz told CNN Snowden should have expressed his concerns to the House Intelligence Committee than leak the documents to the public.
He also criticized Greenwald, saying he was an “ideologue” who didn’t “like America” and loved terrorists. Dershowitz also claimed Greenwald wouldn’t have published leaks about countries such as Venezuela or about the Palestinian Authority.
Snowden said in his Washington Post interview he wanted to give people the information they need to question their governments “and have a say in how they are governed.”
“The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it,” Snowden said in the Alternative Christmas Message. “Together we can find a better balance. End mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story identified Laura Poitras as a “former Guardian journalist.” Poitras is a documentary filmmaker who co-published articles about the NSA in the Guardian, along with Glenn Greenwald.
Comments