A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public.

An elite class that is free to operate without limits - whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior - is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.

Fearlessness can be its own form of power.

As the American Muslim community gets a little bit freer in terms of not being under the thumb of that kind of oppressive mentality, there is going to be some internal dissent. When you are consciously oppressed, you tend to sort of band together and unite because there's a necessity to do so. And that as that proceeds, some of those difference get more into the fore and I think that's the reason you are seeing some internal dissension as a byproduct of the fact that there is not this kind of immediate urgency to unify against this kind of onslaught because that onslaught is refuted.

It’s just simply the fact that the NSA does not think anybody should be able to communicate anywhere on the Earth without them being able to invade it.

It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, . . . its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.