There is more action in some other countries. In Germany, they've called for a very serious inquiry that's discovering more and more. They've just discovered a significant violation of the German Constitution that had been concealed from the Parliament.

We don't have to ask for our privacy, we can take it back.

Nobody's going to vote for terrorism. So our governments don't have that sort of political pressure to act in a responsible manner when it comes to stewardship of our rights.

The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.

The problem is when [the state] monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there's a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.

It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.