According to Edward Snowden, it's 1984.
In an interview with Britain's Channel 4 to be aired Christmas Day, the former National Security Agency contractor compared the government's secret surveillance practices to George Orwell's fiction novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
Published in 1949, the novel depicts an oppressed society where people are under constant watch by the government and any individual thought is prohibited.
"Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information," said Snowden, UPI reported.
"The types of collection in the book- microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us- are nothing compared to what we have available today," Snowden said in the interview, according to UPI.
Channel 4 chose Snowden to give its Alternative Christmas Message, broadcasted every year as an alternative to the Queen's Christmas message.
"We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go," he said. "Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person."
In June, Snowden leaked confidential NSA documents to The Guardian revealing the government collected the Internet and phone records of Americans and government leaders around the world, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Facing federal charges, Snowden fled the U.S., and is currently in Russia on temporary asylum.
"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. 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. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be," Snowden said in the interview.
This is Snowden's first appearance on TV since he arrived in Russia, UPI reported. In a Washington Post interview published Monday, Snowden said he is satisfied with his decision to expose the NSA's surveillance tactics.
"I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a change to determine if it should change itself," he told The Washington Post.
© 2025 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
