I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.

I'm still working for the government.

If I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.

I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.

The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night.

I don't think it's going to be related to social or economic policies; it's going to be the fact that [Barack Obama] said let's go forward, not backward, in regard to the violations of law that occurred under the Bush administration.

You can show a guy sort of peeking over the wall, you can see a guy tunneling underneath, you can see a guy going through the front door. All of those, in cyber terms, are vulnerabilities, because it's not that you have to look for one hole of a specific type. It's the whole paradigm.