Governments cannot require individuals, they cannot require the public as a body, and they cannot require corporations to make investigation and law enforcement easy for them in a liberal society.

When we look at how, constitutionally, only Congress can declare war, and that is routinely ignored. Not NATO or the UN, but Congress has to authorize these endless wars, and it isn't.

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

There is more action in some other countries. In Germany, they've called for a very serious inquiry that's discovering more and more. They've just discovered a significant violation of the German Constitution that had been concealed from the Parliament.

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."

When we have some horrible terrorist attacks happen in some country we see in the recording that follows, that the intelligence community already knew about these people in advance. We know that these countries were involved in intelligence sharing premiums, that they benefited from mass surveillance, and yet they didn't stop the attacks. Yet at the same time we immediately see intelligence officials running to the newspapers and claiming that we need more surveillance, that we need more intrusion, that we need more expense of powers because it could have stopped an attack.