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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.

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.

I long ago lost track of the number of times the Obama administration has assured everyone that its vacuum-cleaner approach to electronic surveillance does not threaten the privacy or the rights of Americans.

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

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.

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

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

The government must give proper weight to both keeping America safe from terrorists and protecting Americans' privacy. But when Americans lack the most basic information about our domestic surveillance programs, they have no way of knowing whether we're getting that balance right. This lack of transparency is a big problem.