Something we have to remember is that everything about the internet is interconnected. All of our systems are not just common to us because of the network links between them, but because of the software packages, because of the hardware devices that comprise it. The same router that's deployed in the United States is deployed in China.

Russia recently passed a law - I think a terrible law - which says you have to store all of the data from Russian citizens on Russian soil just to prevent other countries from playing the same kind of legal games we're playing in this Microsoft case.

I built my own studio. I don't have the professional language to describe it because I'm not a videographer - but I'm a technician. So I get the camera, I get all the things that translate the camera to the computer, I set up a live session, I do the security on it, I set up a background so I can key it out, like newscasters do, and replace it with whatever I want - and I can be anywhere I need to be.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them - it does all of us - a disservice, because it "otherizes" us.

I think we're going to see a move away from that, because young people - digital natives who spend their life on the Internet - get saturated. It's like a fashion trend, and becomes a sign of a lack of sophistication.

I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many.