It's not everyday that a whistleblower is actually willing to be identified.

So my first experience was that I had to do a reboot of my expectations. Like fantastic, great, he's young and charismatic and I was like wow, this is so disorienting, I have to reboot. In retrospect, I can see that it's really powerful that somebody [Snowden] so smart, so young, and with so much to lose risked so much.

Those who are experts in the fields of surveillance, privacy, and technology say that there need to be two tracks: a policy track and a technology track. The technology track is encryption. It works and if you want privacy, then you should use it.

We're definitely in an era where the government wants to keep more secrets and it wants to come after anyone who's exposing those secrets and in many cases exposing government illegality. They're coming after the journalists and they're coming after the whistleblowers. It's not a good sign if the government is expending much energy trying to find out who journalists are talking to.

We've already seen shifts happening in some of the big companies - Google, Apple - that now understand how vulnerable their customer data is, and that if it's vulnerable, then their business is, too, and so you see a beefing up of encryption technologies. At the same time, no programs have been dismantled at the governmental level, despite international pressure.

We don't stand here alone, it's possible through the great organisations that support us. The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed aren't only a threat to privacy but to democracy, when the most important decisions made affect all of us. Thank you to Edward Snowden. I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth.

That's a question you'd have to present to people in the White House.