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

The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen - in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case - that they have become markedly more skeptical.

You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You've converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.

The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public.

We've already seen, in practically every country around the world where these issues have been covered, that the general public has recoiled at the ideology behind these programs.

Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.