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Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

We do not take away the powers of surveillance. We do not take away the right and the power of the government to go after those who would do us wrong.

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.

If surveillance infiltrates our homes and personal relationships, that is a gross breach of our human and civil rights.

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.