Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.

Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.

If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.

The most important thing to the United States is not being able to attack our adversaries, the most important thing is to be able to defend ourselves. And we can't do that as long as we're subverting our own security standards for the sake of surveillance.

What the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation. They want to have a perfect record of the last five years of your life, so when you come to their attention, they can know everything about you. I'm not down with that, but [Bill] Binney was trying to create something like that.

I'm not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.

What I wanted to do was give society the information it needed to decide if it wanted to change the system.