The majority of terrorist attacks that have been disrupted in the United States have been disrupted due to things like the Time Square bomber, who was caught by a hotdog vendor, not a mass surveillance program, not a cyber-espionage campaign.

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.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused.