I hate these questions - I don't like talking about this stuff [popular culture], because it's so... to me, it's so ordinary.

I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

To do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so.

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.

Now terrorism is not the greatest threat facing our societies.

The charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.

If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.