The most important thing to the United States is not being able to attack our adversaries, the most important thing is to be able to defend ourselves. And we can't do that as long as we're subverting our own security standards for the sake of surveillance.

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

I know that fundamentally, changes to the fabric of the internet, and sort of our methods of communication, can enforce our rights.

When people talk about Web 2.0, they mean that when the Internet, the World Wide Web, first became popular, it was one way only.

If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they're network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection.