People say that [i'm a celebrity], but I've only had to sign autographs for "civ-libs" types. And I autograph court orders.

If I and other whistleblowers are sentenced to long years in prison without so much as a chance to explain our motivations to a jury, it will have a deeply chilling effect on future whistleblowers working as I did to expose government abuse and overreach. It will chill speech. It will corrode the quality of our democracy.

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.

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

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.