A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

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.

We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values.

Terrorism kills far fewer people than cigarettes, or alcohol, or car accidents. But we don't see ourselves restructuring society and lives in order to make those threats go away.

There are unquestionable violations of our Constitution.