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.

The internet is shared critical infrastructure for everyone on earth. It's not supposed to be a domain of warfare. We're not supposed to be putting the Unied States' economy on the frontlines in the battleground.

US administration does not want me to return. People forget how I ended up in Russia. They waited until I departed Hong Kong to cancel my passport in order to trap me in Russia, because it's the most effective attack they have against me, given the political climate in the United States.

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?

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.

You don't need to justify your rights as a citizen - that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, "I don't need them in this context" or "I can't understand this," they are no longer rights.

It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.