I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many.

I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences.

We have these traditional political parties that are less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people, so people are in search of their own values.

My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled. If they really wanted to capture me, they would've allowed me to travel to Latin America, because the CIA can operate with impunity down there. They did not want that; they chose to keep me in Russia.

[Bill] Binney will argue with you all day about ThinThread, but his idea was that it would collect everything about everybody but be immediately encrypted so no one could read it. Only a court could give intelligence officials the key to decrypt it. The idea was to find a kind of a compromise between [privacy rights and] the assertion that if you don't collect things as they happen, you won't have them later - because what the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation.

I have had no contact with the Chinese government ... I only work with journalists.