KATHARINE GUN

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?

I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S.

Cheering crowds have never been my sort of thing.

Most people don't know what goes on in the intelligence services. Certainly I had very little idea what went on in GCHQ. For me it was a job, a chance to use my languages.

I wouldn't describe myself as an activist.

I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement.

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.

In any walk of life, you can choose to do the right thing.

I'm not a politician; I don't have a well-organised PR machine to craft my every word.

Because I'm not ambitious it's not paramount for me to find myself in a high-paid job.

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.

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.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

We're living in a society where there's a cacophony of noise and opinion.

If my own country is subverting the rule of law and sending its own citizens, its military, into harm's way on the basis of lies and propaganda, I would argue that being a patriot is calling out those lies and saying, 'No, you don't send our military into harm's way with no legal justification.'

I did everything I could to remain anonymous for as long as possible.

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.

I think of journalists as being bullet-proof in a way.

The world is moving in a completely fascist, corporate direction. It worries me, it should worry us all.

I was just wondering if I'd ever get a visa to go to the U.S. Probably not.

I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.

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.

It is vital to speak up in a democracy. Otherwise we are living in dictatorships.

I know my own flaws only too well.

I know people have tried to make citizens' arrests on Tony Blair and so on, but really it's time the international criminal court has some guts and charges white war criminals. They need to face justice just like other war criminals.