There was a real choice when [Barack Obama] became president. It was a very difficult choice - to say, "We're not going to hold senior officials to account with the same laws that every other citizen in the country is held to," or "This is a nation that believes in the rule of law."

The question of whether I, as a whistleblower, should be pardoned, is not for me to answer.

We should never allow computers to make inherently governmental decisions in terms of the application of military force, even if that's happening on the internet.

The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

The US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

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.