Buffett said he understands the position of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who does not want to open up the iPhones of everyday Americans to government scrutiny. "I don't know Tim [Cook] real well. Everything I know about his is he's a high-grade an individual as you can imagine," he said.

The Edward Snowden leak case, which exposed some of the practical elements of NSA surveillance operations unknown to many Americans, has also revealed just how divided the nation remains over whether the government should be permitted to intrude on privacy to safeguard national security.

Americans are divided over whether or not the U.S. government has gone too far in using surveillance practices that infringe on citizens' privacy, an NBC News online survey found. While 38 percent of Americans say the government's surveillance program has gone too far in infringing on people's privacy, 35 percent say the government's program has been relatively balanced between privacy concerns and fighting terrorism.

What Edward Snowden has done is to force a long repressed debate about how much liberty, if any, we need to sacrifice in order to protect our security. Before his leaks, that urgent conversation was a non-debate because the violations of liberty were being done entirely in secret, beyond the reach of democratic deliberation.

Edward Snowden was a former NSA worker who gathered information from millions of people through mass surveillance, He leaked information about why the government does certain things to "protect" American lives. The interview also goes further to explain how to help protect your privacy and some other insightful information.

President Obama signed legislation into law on Tuesday evening reinstating key counterterrorism laws and reforming the government's surveillance powers. The announcement from the White House that Obama had signed the USA Freedom Act came a few hours after the bill sailed through the Senate 67-32, following a protracted debate that lasted for weeks and forced some of the provisions to expire for nearly two days.

Mass surveillance is the subjection of a population or significant component of a group to indiscriminate monitoring. It involves a systematic interference with people's right to privacy. Any system that generates and collects data on individuals without attempting to limit the dataset to well-defined targeted individuals is a form of mass surveillance.