When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside.

A number of countries, including some who have loudly criticized the NSA, privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower, that our intelligence capabilities are critical to meeting these responsibilities, and that they themselves have relied on the information we obtain to protect their own people.

We've evolved a lot since 9/11 also, in terms of our law enforcement capabilities, our intelligence capabilities, military, counterterrorism.

I think that the risk to all the progress we've made was at stake in the election because not just the president-elect but a lot of members of Congress, including now the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have said that their principal agenda was to undo a lot of this progress. But as I've been talking about over the last several days when it comes to health care, the gains that we've made are there. Twenty million people have health insurance that didn't have it before. The uninsured rate is the lowest it's ever been.

The truth is that America has been closely divided politically for quite some time. That was reflected in some of the challenges I had with the Republican Congress.

It's useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.

Let's make two things clear: Isil is not "Islamic." No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of Isil's victims have been Muslim. And Isil is certainly not a state.