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This article came through from NHK News Web.

Snowden: “Let’s Stop the Collection of Personal Information”

It says that he

called for people to “make governments stop collecting personal information on a massive scale.”

This seemed suspicious, so I checked the original. Here it is.

Alternative Christmas Message: Alternative Christmas Message 2013 on 4oD at Channel4.com
Xmas Message from Snowden

As I expected, he did not say that. What he said was:

Let’s end mass surveillance.

In the process, he also discusses privacy.

George Orwell, from Britain, warned us of the danger of this kind of surveillance society, but the means described there, such as televisions and microphones, are nothing compared with what we face today.

We carry sensors in our pockets that track us wherever we go.

Think about the impact this has on the privacy of the average person.
Children born today will grow up with no concept of privacy at all.
They will never know what it means to have “a precious moment of their own[1]—a moment that is not recorded and in which their thoughts are not analyzed.”
This is a serious problem.
Because privacy matters.
Privacy is what allows us to decide who we are and who we want to become.

He then makes this appeal:

Let us join together and end the mass surveillance society.

Calling this “the collection of personal information” does not convey the meaning at all. And what does “personal information” mean in that context? Personal information as defined by the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (2003)? Or what ordinary people understand as personal information? Either way, isn’t it far off the mark?

This was one news story that made me very curious whether there was some hidden reason for avoiding the expression “surveillance society.”

[1] The original expression is “Private Moment.” Translating it literally would not convey the meaning in Japanese, so I translated its sense as shown above.

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