There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.

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

We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.

People have to be free to investigate computer security. People have to be free to look for the vulnerabilities and create proof of concept code to show that they are true vulnerabilities in order for us to secure our systems.

Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.

That's one of the biggest issues that we see in the question of governments right now, I think, in the Western world. Is that increasingly all of our elected officials are pulled from the same class. These aren't normal people. I don't want to say they're all terrible people, but at the same time, they're not like you and me. These are people who have sort of a nine to five working history.