I've never heard a White House staff say that the president was too stupid or too ill-informed to have broken the law. And that's really what it comes down to. The truth is, he leaked highly classified information that he shouldn't have leaked. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm the president. Nobody can punish me for that." It's another thing entirely to just deny that he did it. We know that he did it. And he really ought to own up to it.

I can remember only a small handful of instances in which I talked about politics with my parents. I remember my parents telling me that Daniel Ellsberg was a hero when I was six years old.

The truth of the matter is, we can certainly fight against terrorism and fight terrorist groups around the world without having to give up our own civil liberties. They're not mutually exclusive.

Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated -- not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of government on torture. But I'm on the right side of history. There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.

The CIA has transformed from an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets, into a paramilitary organization, a paramilitary force. It's not supposed to be a paramilitary force. It's not good at it. It needs to return to its roots.

It's not up to Google, it's not up to Apple to turn over our personal communications in order to save the country. It's up to the CIA and it's up to the FBI to recruit foreign - I mean to recruit human sources, rather, to penetrate these groups.

It's much less romantic in that you have to go to www.cia.gov and click "Apply Now." For me it was much more clandestine.