All I was was a mechanism.

As I said before, [patriotism] is distinct from acting to benefit the government - a distinction that's increasingly lost today.

I've been recognized every now and then. It's always in computer stores. It's something like brain associations, because I'll be in the grocery store and nobody will recognize me. Even in my glasses, looking exactly like my picture, nobody will recognize me. But I could be totally clean-shaven, hat on, looking nothing like myself in a computer store, and they're like, "Snowden?!"

There is more action in some other countries. In Germany, they've called for a very serious inquiry that's discovering more and more. They've just discovered a significant violation of the German Constitution that had been concealed from the Parliament.

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.

One concern I had while I was working actively in the intelligence community - being someone who had broad access, who was exposed to more reports than average individuals, who had a better understanding of the bigger picture - was that the post - World War II, post - Cold War directions of societies were either broadly authoritarian or [broadly] liberal or libertarian.