So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.

What has a great value to us as a nation is the internet itself. The internet is critical infrastructure to the United States. We use the internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day.

In the United States and some of the other countries involved it's sort of a "five eyes" global spying alliance. That's the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. They've had a little bit of a more muscular public response. Now, they haven't been satisfying or really meaningful in any country yet. But they have been engaging.

If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.

[Bill] Binney will argue with you all day about ThinThread, but his idea was that it would collect everything about everybody but be immediately encrypted so no one could read it. Only a court could give intelligence officials the key to decrypt it. The idea was to find a kind of a compromise between [privacy rights and] the assertion that if you don't collect things as they happen, you won't have them later - because what the NSA really wants is the capability of retrospective investigation.

[Occupy Wall Street] had an impact on consciousness. It was not effective in realizing change.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.