There were no whistleblower protections that would've protected me - and that's known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.

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

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?

These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual even without the government having any intent to do you wrong.

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.

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.