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

The surveillance revelations are critically important because they revealed that our rights are being redefined in secret, by secret courts that were never intended to have that role - without the consent of the public, without even the awareness of the majority of our political representatives.

If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

I'm saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest.

Nobody's going to vote for terrorism. So our governments don't have that sort of political pressure to act in a responsible manner when it comes to stewardship of our rights.

A different [Ronald] Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn't even authorized by law. It's just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan's signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers - sending hundreds of millions of people's communications back and forth every day - were completely unprotected, electronically naked.

Privacy is a function of liberty.