People do not like being lied to, and they do not like having their rights violated. So as soon as [officials] stop making arguments, you see support for me starts to rise.

These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual even without the government having any intent to do you wrong.

We're opening the doors to people launching missiles and dropping bombs by taking the human out of the decision chain for deciding how we should respond to these threats. And this is something we're seeing more and more happening in the traditional means as our methods of warfare become increasingly automated and roboticized such as through drone warfare.

I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works.

I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong's rule of law.

The charges [government] brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense.

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.