I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future, we're going to know that that's a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is.

The bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute.

We can't simply scare people into giving up their rights, on the basis, oh, this protects us from terrorism.

Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.

I considered bringing forward information about these surveillance programs prior to the election, but I held off because I believed that [Barack] Obama was genuine when he said he was going to change things. I wanted to give the democratic process time to work.