It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern. But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.

Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage.

When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, "Well, how are we going to deal with this data?" And I was like, "I didn't even know it existed."

One concern I had while I was working actively in the intelligence community - being someone who had broad access, who was exposed to more reports than average individuals, who had a better understanding of the bigger picture - was that the post - World War II, post - Cold War directions of societies were either broadly authoritarian or [broadly] liberal or libertarian.

We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.

We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.