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The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

This has been a learning experience for me. I also thought that privacy was something we were granted in the Constitution. I have learned from this when in fact the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution.

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.

I really believe that we don't have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.

But what I want to assure and reassure the public is we are concerned about your safety, your security, and your privacy. Let's work together in partnership to ensure that we can have the best way forward.

How to strike the right balance between our privacy and our expectation that the state will protect us and facilitate our freedom is one of the most difficult challenges facing us all.