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.

The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public.

The new iPhone has encryption that protects the contents of the phone. This means if someone steals your phone - if a hacker or something images your phone - they can't read what's on the phone itself, they can't look at your pictures, they can't see the text messages you send, and so forth. But it does not stop law enforcement from tracking your movements via geolocation on the phone if they think you are involved in a kidnapping case, for example.

A given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.

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 don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

Some months after [Keith Alexander] made that statement [Edward Snowden cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation], the new director of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said that, in fact, he doesn't see the sky falling. It's not so serious after all.