Snowden’s alternative TV Christmas message

Edward Snowden will deliver an “alternative” Christmas greeting to British television viewers Wednesday, reported CNN.
The National Security Agency leaker will urge listeners to rally against mass government surveillance when he gives Channel 4’s annual Alternative Christmas Message, which follows Queen Elizabeth II’s traditional Christmas broadcast.

“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,” Snowden will say in the Wednesday address, according to a transcript that Channel 4 released a day in advance.

Snowden is now living in asylum in Russia after leaking U.S. surveillance secrets to the news media earlier this year. He is wanted in the United States on espionage charges.

In his address, Snowden will assert that the types of surveillance imagined in George Orwell’s “1984” are “nothing compared to what we have available today.”

In his another record, the whistleblower called for an end to mass spying by governments, stating that a child born today will have “no conception of privacy.”