I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.

One of the kind of unexpectedly liberating things of becoming this global fugitive is the fact that you don't worry so much about tomorrow. You think more about today. And unexpectedly, I like that very much.

How do we preserve our civil rights, our traditions as a liberal democracy, in a time when government power is expanding and is more and more difficult to check?

Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.

If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.

What we're seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites; now we've got all these boutiques.

I don't think it's going to be related to social or economic policies; it's going to be the fact that [Barack Obama] said let's go forward, not backward, in regard to the violations of law that occurred under the Bush administration.