If I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.

We can still publicly post a message to Facebook that's globally readable. But we could also adjust things so that they can only be shared with those closest to us, and the confident that this is enforced through both legal and a systemic standards-based protection.

The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.

So many of the things we're told by the government simply aren't true.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I'm some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative.

The United States need to be focusing more on creating a more secure, more reliable, more robust, and more trusted internet, not one that's weaker, not one that relies on this systemic model of exploiting every vulnerability, every threat out there.