While Americans gathered with their families to share anything and everything, Edward Snowden, the man who revealed the National Security Agency’s mass data collection programs, had a message about the state of privacy in the world.

“The mission’s already accomplished,” Snowden told the Washington Post. “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.”