The Socialist Equality Party in the UK is holding a meeting in Oxford in defence of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Snowden has revealed to the world the extent of the spying operations being conducted by the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies, with the collaboration of major corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, YouTube and Facebook.

The phone records, Internet activity, emails and other electronic communications of tens of millions of people, in the US and internationally, are being systematically monitored, recorded and entered into vast databases. Amid a deepening global economic crisis, the financial aristocracy, terrified of the rising popular discontent over social inequality, mass unemployment and constant war, is establishing the framework for a police state.

Snowden, a 29-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, faces grave dangers for his courageous actions. American politicians, Democrat and Republican, are baying for his blood. The American media has joined the witch-hunt, with so-called liberal commentators denouncing him as a “traitor” and right-wing pundits calling for his execution.

Britain’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat government and its Labour predecessor are complicit in the crimes exposed by Snowden. Snowden revealed that the UK’s main electronic spying operation, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the NSA record the content of phone calls, email messages, Facebook posts and browser histories via a programme called Tempora, in operation since 2008. The scale of such spying is almost unimaginable. Some 600 million “telephone events” are monitored by GCHQ each day.

Just as it aided and abetted the Obama administration’s vendetta against Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, Britain is now colluding with Washington in persecuting Snowden.

The Socialist Equality Party in the UK calls on the working class and young people in Britain and around the world to defend Edward Snowden. Like Assange and alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning, he is being persecuted for revealing the truth about the conspiracy against the democratic rights of working people. Support for him must be built up in workplaces, at universities and schools and in working-class areas.

The SEP meeting will explain that the only social force that can defeat the threat of dictatorship and secure the defence of Snowden and the democratic rights of all, is a mass political movement of the working class, fighting for an internationalist and socialist perspective to abolish the profit system.

Tuesday September 3, 7pm

Oxford Town Hall (Panel Room)

St Aldate’s

OX1 1BX