Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

[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.

[Brazil] went to the UN and said, "We need new standards for this." We need to take a look at what they're calling "data sovereignty."

If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.

I think that's actually what's missing from government, for the most part. We've got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It's just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven't engaged with Washington until recently. They're still playing catch-up.

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.

Where are we going to reject that easy but flawed process of letting the intelligence services do whatever they want? It's inevitable that it will happen. I think it's going to be where Internet businesses go.