There are even a few [people] who still honestly believe I sold information to [Vladimir] Putin - like personally, in exchange for asylum. And this is after the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, who gets to read the NSA's reporting on my activities every morning, said all of these conspiracies are delusional.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works

[Sovereignty] would break the American monopoly, but it would also break Internet business, because you'd have to have a data center in every country. And data centers are tremendously expensive, a big capital investment.

I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong's rule of law.

Sometimes that irrational commitment to principle is what society needs to survive. Whenever you talk about radicalism, whenever you talk about activism, whenever you talk about progressive activity, that sort of moves the measure of liberty in human society forward, makes us all enjoy a better standard of liberty, it typically starts out criminal. It typically starts out a little bit shaky, and rather radical. And that's irrational to put yourself up to do that.

I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.