I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. 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.

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

We've got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths.

If it comes to a question of law, the charges they brought against me - the Espionage Act - is called the quintessential political crime. A political crime, in legal terms, is defined as any crime against a state, as opposed to against an individual. Assassination, for example, is not a political crime because you've killed a person, an individual, and they've been harmed; their family's been harmed. But the state itself, you can't be extradited for harming it.

We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.