Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

The bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute.

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.

These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.