I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

We've learned that we've allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities.

The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we're actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that's where researchers are going to go and that's where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that's where breakthroughs are going to occur.

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

While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice - that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

The reality is if we sit back and allow a few officials behind closed doors to launch offensive attacks without any oversight against foreign nations, against people we don't like, against political groups, radicals, and extremists whose ideas we may not agree with, and could be repulsive or even violent - if we let that happen without public buy-in, we won't have any seat at the table of government to decide whether or not it's appropriate for these officials to drag us into some kind of war activity that we don't want, but we weren't aware of at the time.