If Congress is going to investigate baseball players about whether or not they told the truth, how can we justify giving the most powerful intelligence official, [James] Clapper, a pass? This is how J. Edgar Hoover ended up in charge of the FBI forever.

I think that's actually what's missing from government, for the most part. We've got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It's just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven't engaged with Washington until recently. They're still playing catch-up.

We need to make sure that whenever we're engaging in a cyber-warfare campaign, a cyber-espionage campaign in the United States, that we understand the word cyber is used as a euphemism for the internet, because the American public would not be excited to hear that we're doing internet warfare campaigns, internet espionage campaigns, because we realize that we ourselves are impacted by it.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?

I've been watching The Wire recently.

Sometimes that irrational commitment to principle is what society needs to survive. Whenever you talk about radicalism, whenever you talk about activism, whenever you talk about progressive activity, that sort of moves the measure of liberty in human society forward, makes us all enjoy a better standard of liberty, it typically starts out criminal. It typically starts out a little bit shaky, and rather radical. And that's irrational to put yourself up to do that.