The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

When we talk about computer network exploitation, computer network attack, we're not just talking about your home PC. We're talking about your cell phone, and we're also talking about internet routers themselves. The NSA is attacking the critical infrastructure of the internet to try to take ownership of it. They hack the routers that connect nations to the internet itself.

It also comes down to parenting. It is important to know what your beliefs are, and that you have to stand up for them or you don't really believe in them. You know, my father and mother - in fact, every member of my immediate family - have worked for the federal government. Sometimes misunderstood is that I didn't stand up to overthrow the system.

You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You've converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.

While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice - that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

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