I do not expect to see home again.

There was a real choice when [Barack Obama] became president. It was a very difficult choice - to say, "We're not going to hold senior officials to account with the same laws that every other citizen in the country is held to," or "This is a nation that believes in the rule of law."

I was hoping to catch [Vladimir] Putin in a lie - like what happened to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper [in his congressional testimony]. So I asked Putin basically the same questions about Russian mass surveillance. I knew he's doing the same thing, but he denied it.

We've already seen, in practically every country around the world where these issues have been covered, that the general public has recoiled at the ideology behind these programs.

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.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

[Bill] Binney will argue with you all day about ThinThread, but his idea was that it would collect everything about everybody but be immediately encrypted so no one could read it. Only a court could give intelligence officials the key to decrypt it. The idea was to find a kind of a compromise between [privacy rights and] the assertion that if you don't collect things as they happen, you won't have them later - because what the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation.