They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.

They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.

I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.

So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.

Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phone calls and the [Government Communications Headquarters] was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.

What I wanted to do was give society the information it needed to decide if it wanted to change the system.

People in both parties from the congressional intelligence committees - all these co-opted officials who play cheerleader for spy agencies - go on these Sunday shows and they say: "Snowden was a traitor. He works against Americans. He works for the Chinese. Oh, wait, he left Hong Kong - he works for the Russians."