The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it's my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called "liberty" and during the Internet Revolution is called "privacy.

We'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.

That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists.

When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists.