Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President

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.

The [George W.] Bush administration marked a very serious and profoundly negative turning point - not just for the nation, but for the international order, because we started to govern on the idea of "might makes right." And that's a very old, toxic and infectious idea.

I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.

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

You would be surprised how effective, at least for influencing low-information voters, negative propaganda about me is.

Until we reform our laws and until we fix the excesses of these old policies that we inherited in the post-9/11 era, we're not going to be able to put the security back in the NSA.