The idea that there is personal privacy is "laughable, you have no privacy". People should give up worrying about privacy because it is impossible to achieve.
"Think of all the anxiety you could solve if everybody just accepted that," he told Lex Fridman.
Fridman reluctantly agreed telling the story of how when he was a Phd student he developed key logging software as part of a project, and was then astonished when he went into the offices of CEOs and found that they had not even bothered to log out of their computers.
Key logging allows an interloper to discover exactly what a computer user is up to at any moment.
Andrew Bustamante argued that the nation's security was too important to allow ordinary people to be in the driving seat.
"The general mass community shouldn't have a say in what happens in the intelligence community," he said. "They really shouldn't."
He was particularly concerned that the effectiveness of the National Security Agency had been reduced as a result of the outcry caused by the Snowden revelations.
Apparently you can trust the spooks because they are not interested in your politics, or whether you pay your taxes; they simply want to track down and deal with those who threaten national security. This was not Annie Machon's view when she worked for MI5.
Even if they did start to gather information about subversives, or people with views hostile to the government, there was nothing they could do with the data since the American courts would not take action and there was no secret police force in the USA.
Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy on the Lex Fridman podcast 310.
Jonathan Brind