You know, George, the Tom Marwood investigation is under my command, and God help you if you interfere with it or question my allocation of resources.

I would start by telling them that being an authority figure requires you to make hard, unpopular decisions for the greater good.

Uh, normal NSA employees have a combination of clearances called TS, SI, TK, and Gamma.

To wage an attack on the First Council, the flagrant disregard of my power-- it will not go unanswered.

Security clearance gives you access to all of the Bureau's top secret intelligence, which is crucial if you want to spend your career working on the FBI's highest-priority cases.

Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.

And the officer in that film, in two days' time, will appear before an inquest jury in London, and they have the power to decide that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed.

The only programmers who can change it are people who've specifically been given permission to access it, and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change.

Something to do with the slightly over 5, 000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff.

We need to radically open up development so knowledge flows in multiple directions, inspiring practitioners, so aid becomes transparent, accountable and effective, so governments open up and citizens are engaged and empowered with reformers in government.

Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel.

Integrators are not middle offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate.

When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality.

You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment, their intelligence.

So it's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy, like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise, are the same values that underly the Internet.

And I'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation.

So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are.

That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action.

I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that.

We got the reigns but we also got the risk, and it turns out that millions of us just aren't that good at voluntarily investing over 40 years.

And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups that generally lie on the extremes.

But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies to the 21st century.

We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power.

And I allowed discrepancies between men and women in operating budgets, disciplinary councils, in decision-making capacities, and I gave my religion a free pass because I loved it.

Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry, so it is our duty to know how it works and what authority each branch of government has over its citizens.

We still did it because we listened to that inner spirit, because I realized this: if I was to see real police reform in the communities that I had authority over for public safety, we had to change our stinkin' thinkin'.

By this I mean all of these nodes in the network do not need to know each other or trust each other, because they each have the ability to monitor and validate the chain for themselves.

But when you have a lose-lose situation like with climate change, it's much more difficult without some overarching authority, real authority.

We'll help these countries accredit these workers, so that they're not stuck remaining an under-recognized, undervalued group, but become a renowned, empowered profession, just like nurses and doctors.

But they're also so self-assured that they'll be able to change their behavior once they've earned the authority to do things differently, and that is a trap.

I work with another senior client who summed up this dilemma beautifully when we were talking about why he and his peers haven't empowered the folks below them with more decision rights.

If we want these teams to be fast, flexible, creative, like a mini-start-up, they have to be empowered and autonomous.

But during this time, Napoleon Bonaparte had assumed power in France, and made it his mission to restore slavery and French authority throughout the empire.

The corrupting of our political life had become a living nightmare; nothing was exempt -- separation of powers, civil liberties, the rule of law, the relationship of church and state.

What they are is an addition of tadpoles that are named after a local bureaucrat whose decisions affect your water quality.

And these three pillars -- dedication, belonging and empowerment -- worked together in a kind of self-reinforcing cycle, and the closer we got to shutdown, the better our output became.