I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement.
I'm just baffled in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues.
I was arrested on suspicion of breach of Official Secrets Act in March 2003, but they didn't charge me until November. Now, the in-between months, I was bailed and re-bailed, and my life was on standstill. I was in limbo. It was a difficult time for me and my family, because we just did not know what the future held for us.
When you have the initial GCHQ induction course for new arrivals, they tell you… not to trust journalists, to be careful to keep everything confidential.
I did not make my disclosure about the deceitful manipulation of the U.N. before the invasion of Iraq began in order to garner fame or fortune.
It is vital to speak up in a democracy. Otherwise we are living in dictatorships.
I'm a fairly happy-go-lucky person, generally fairly optimistic, but there were points when I was down.
I felt guilty - like, I leaked this memo, and now there's going to be a witch hunt for the person who did it, and I'm not going to be able to deny it. That was when reality hit.
I didn't feel at all guilty about what I did, so I couldn't plead guilty, even though I would get a more lenient sentence.
The whole Big Brother vision of the world is looming large.
After the initial flurry of media interest, I was left to figure out how to move on with my life - and that proved hard. I was glad to get back to what I hoped would be normality, but the effect on me had been traumatising.
Working at GCHQ was a relatively easy, reliable job. As long as you always toe the 'party line', you are more or less guaranteed a job for life.
Why did the British authorities wait eight months before charging me - and then drop the charges, claiming there was insufficient evidence for prosecution when I had confessed to the leak from the start?
We all need to be conscious of what news we take as gospel. And we need to maybe be a little bit sceptical about what we digest.
I've never met Snowden, I've never spoken with him personally. I mean, he's extremely smart. Very, very smart. I guess he was a lot less naive than I was.
I mean, Ed Snowden was basically saying the same things that Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and other U.S. whistleblowers had said before him. But he came out more publicly, and maybe revealed more. He showed that when the U.S. government said, 'We are not surveilling U.S. citizens,' that was a lie.
