We decentralise permissions over the use of our communications.

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice - that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

When we look at the full-on mass surveillance watching everyone in the country, in the United States, it doesn't work. It didn't stop the attacks in Boston. The marathon bombings. Where again, we knew who these individuals were. It didn't stop the Underwear Bomber, whose father walked into an embassy and warned us about this individual before he walked onto an airplane. And it's not going to stop the next attacks either. Because again, they're not public safety programmes. They're spying programmes. They are valuable for spying.

When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense.

In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work.

My perspective is if you're not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don't care enough.