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

The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.

The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President

If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.

I've been recognized every now and then. It's always in computer stores. It's something like brain associations, because I'll be in the grocery store and nobody will recognize me. Even in my glasses, looking exactly like my picture, nobody will recognize me. But I could be totally clean-shaven, hat on, looking nothing like myself in a computer store, and they're like, "Snowden?!"

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.