The former NSA security contractor Edward J. Snowden, the former urged an end to mass surveillance, arguing that the electronic monitoring he has exposed surpasses anything imagined by George Orwell in 1984, a dystopian vision of an all-knowing state.

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” Snowden stated this during 2013 Christmas Day message showed  by Channel 4. “They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.

Edward Snowden answered Q&A on Thursday 23 January over Twitter on the topic of “President Barack Obama's recent spying speech  to encrypting emails.

But when it came to waxing on the appropriate extent of the US national security apparatus, Snowden gave an answer that may surprise some folks.

"Not all spying is bad," he responded. "The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents' communication every single day.

"This is done not because it's necessary ... but because new technologies make it easy and cheap."

People, Snowden noted, should be able to "dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it's going to look like on their permanent record."   

Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/snowden-not-all-spying-bad-new-tech-has-made-mass-surveillance-cheap-and-easy--1218155 

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/24/americas_top_computer_scientists_rebuke_mass_surveillance_newscred/