We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.

Maybe boutique media, maybe people who are reading papers and talking to academics and whatnot, maybe they understand, because they're high-information. But a lot of people are still unaware that I never intended to end up in Russia. They're not aware that journalists were live-tweeting pictures of my seat on the flight to Latin America I wasn't able to board because the US government revoked my passport.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them - it does all of us - a disservice, because it "otherizes" us.

If I had to guess what the future's going to look like for me - assuming it's not an orange jumpsuit in a hole - I think I'm going to alternate between tech and policy.

There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes.

I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.