[Our system of education ]not designed to create critical thinkers.

It also comes down to parenting. It is important to know what your beliefs are, and that you have to stand up for them or you don't really believe in them. You know, my father and mother - in fact, every member of my immediate family - have worked for the federal government. Sometimes misunderstood is that I didn't stand up to overthrow the system.

Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.

I'm still alive, and I don't lose sleep because I have done what I feel I needed to do, it was the right thing to do and I am not going to be afraid.

The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we'll lose that, and it's going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict.

[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.

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.