If the weather is leaving you less than snowed in this holiday season, how about a pile of Edward Snowden? The former NSA contractor sat down with the Washington Post, his first face-to-face interview since being granted temporary asylum in Russia last June, and sounded quite cheerful.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
And his holiday mirth did not stop there. Snowden has recorded a Christmas Day message to be broadcast on UK’s Channel 4 Wednesday afternoon – during a long-running programming slot reserved as an alternative to the Queen’s Christmas message airing on other television networks. In an excerpt released by Channel 4 and published in The Guardian, Snowden warned, “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”
Read more from Snowden, including the details of his life in Russia, which he compares to that of an “indoor cat”, over at the Washington Post.
