The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.

There's a real danger in the way our representative government functions today. It functions properly only when paired with accountability.

In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work.

Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.

I told the government I'd volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose.