If I had to guess what the future's going to look like for me - assuming it's not an orange jumpsuit in a hole - I think I'm going to alternate between tech and policy.

The state says: "Well, in order for it to be legitimate civil disobedience, you have to follow these rules." They put us in "free-speech zones"; they say you can only do it at this time, and in this way, and you can't interrupt the functioning of the government. They limit the impact that civil disobedience can achieve. We have to remember that civil disobedience must be disobedience if it's to be effective.

We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.

My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.

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.

If we simply follow the rules that a state imposes upon us when that state is acting contrary to the public interest, we're not actually improving anything. We're not changing anything.

A different [Ronald] Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn't even authorized by law. It's just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan's signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers - sending hundreds of millions of people's communications back and forth every day - were completely unprotected, electronically naked.