Tom

“The single biggest lesson of the whole Snowden fiasco is that America's own sloppiness made it vulnerable: whether to misguided whistleblowers, saboteurs or foreign spies is secondary. The intelligence agencies and their political and judicial overseers also need to do a much better job of explaining what they do and why.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we should be worse than men since we were also created by God.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Relationships have decayed; trust has ebbed. This is not a new problem. George W Bush's administration made a bonfire of American soft power with its botched war in Iraq. In different ways, the Obama administration's remote, chilly and arrogant style has compounded the damage.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster