[Occupy Wall Street] had an impact on consciousness. It was not effective in realizing change.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

What I wanted to do was give society the information it needed to decide if it wanted to change the system.

Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process - they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.

The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the 'consent of the governed' is meaningless... The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

What we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.