When the most important decisions are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control.

I don't speak Arabic - I know a little to get by, but that's all.

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.

Snowden is almost preternaturally prepossessing and self-possessed. I think of a novelist whose dream character just walks into his or her head. It must have been like that with you and Snowden. But what if he'd been a graying guy with the same documents and far less intelligent things to say about them? In other words, how exactly did who he was make your movie and remake our world?

Just consider the CIA and its effort to suppress the Senate's review of its torture program. Take in the fact that we live in a country that a) legalized torture and b) where no one was ever held to account for it, and now the government's internal look at what happened is being suppressed by the CIA. That's a frightening landscape to be in.

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.

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.