Snowden to deliver 'alternative' Christmas address to UK

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden (Fox News)

NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been asked to by a British broadcaster to give an "alternative Christmas message" to the people of the United Kingdom.

Snowden's statement, which will be broadcast on Christmas Day on Britain's Channel 4, will compare government surveillance of people around the world to spying methods imagined by British author George Orwell in 1984.

"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all," Snowden's statement says, in part. "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 will make his statement via video from Moscow, Russia, where he has lived since that country granted him temporary asylum earlier this year. In an interview with The Washington Post published earlier this week, Snowden said he considered that he had accomplished his mission by starting a discussion of the NSA's gathering of phone and Internet records of millions of Americans.

Channel 4 has broadcast an "alternative Christmas message" every year since 1993. It is meant to lampoon the Royal Christmas message delivered on the same day by the ruling British monarch, a tradition that began in 1932 with a radio broadcast by George V, the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II.