You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

On the other hand, the Internet is there to fill needs that people have for information and socialization. We get this sort of identification thing going on nowadays because it's a very fractious time. We live in a time of troubles.

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.

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

Do we want to emulate China in the way that China emulates the West? I think, for most Americans, the answer to that question would be no.

I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.