The [George W.] Bush administration marked a very serious and profoundly negative turning point - not just for the nation, but for the international order, because we started to govern on the idea of "might makes right." And that's a very old, toxic and infectious idea.

I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.

We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.

What I wanted to do was give society the information it needed to decide if it wanted to change the system.

The question that we, as a society, have to ask is, are our collective rights worth a small relative advantage in our ability to spy on other countries and foreign citizens? I have my opinion about that, but we all collectively have to come to our opinion about it.

The internet exchange is sort of the core points where all of the international cables come together, where all of the internet service providers come together, and they trade lines with each other. These are priority one targets for any sort of espionage agency, because they provide access to so many people's communications.

[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.