For people who aren't familiar with my background, I didn't graduate high school. My career high salary was about $200,000. My last position was about $122,000. For a guy without a high school diploma, that's pretty good.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

I don't think it is the most important thing. I think it is the fact that the director of national intelligence gave a false statement to Congress under oath, which is a felony. If we allow our officials to knowingly break the law publicly and face no consequences, we're instituting a culture of immunity, and this is what I think historically will actually be considered the biggest disappointment of the [Barack] Obama administration.

What we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.

[Barton ] Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers "exploded in profanity."

Our founders did not write that 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.'

We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.