We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism.

Has the center of gravity shifted such that all governments have greater powers and fewer restrictions than they ever had, and are empowered by technology in a way that no government ever was in the past?

Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.

A given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.

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.

We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.

I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.