I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.

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

I don't want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement.

I'm ultimately satisfied that we know a little bit more about how the world really works.

I was hoping to catch [Vladimir] Putin in a lie - like what happened to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper [in his congressional testimony]. So I asked Putin basically the same questions about Russian mass surveillance. I knew he's doing the same thing, but he denied it.

I hate these questions - I don't like talking about this stuff [popular culture], because it's so... to me, it's so ordinary.

I would say the first key concept is that, in terms of technological and communication progress in human history, the Internet is basically the equivalent of electronic telepathy. We can now communicate all the time through our little magic smartphones with people who are anywhere, all the time, constantly learning what they're thinking, talking about, exchanging messages. And this is a new capability even within the context of the Internet.