I was in correspondence with an anonymous source for about five months and in the process of developing a dialogue you build ideas, of course, about who that person might be. My idea was that he was in his late forties, early fifties. I figured he must be Internet generation because he was super tech-savvy, but I thought that, given the level of access and information he was able to discuss, he had to be older.

One of the things that I think is true is that encryption actually is able to secure our communications, that every individual can use encryption, and that it's accessible and in many cases free.

In all my work, I'm interested in understanding big issues through the lives of individuals.

I think it's radical to censor information because the government asks you to. That's radical.

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

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.

People are starting to understand that the devices we carry with us reveal our location, who we're talking to, and all kinds of other information.