Tom

“Nothing evinced so far justifies the catastrophic damage that the Snowden leaks have done to national security—the worst disaster in the history of American and British intelligence.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“But to portray the NSA and its partner services, as Greenwald does, as akin to East Germany's Stasi, or to the KGB, and claiming that they have the 'literal' goal to 'eliminate privacy globally'42 is an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. So far, nothing of the kind has been forthcoming. As Snowden's 'Christmas message' broadcast on Britain's Channel Four television stated: A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves: an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.43 But this is a huge exaggeration. What the Snowden documents do appear to show”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“If the NSA is able to intercept the communications of a top Russian politician, surely it deserves praise (in private), not censure and exposure (in public). Providing the full list of Snowden's damaging disclosures would be tedious. But even the highlights are shocking. They include: how the NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, and that it is keeping a closer eye on the security of that country's nuclear weapons; an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; e-mail intercepts regarding Iran; and global tracking of cell-phone calls to (as the Washington Post naively put it) 'look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect'. To the South China Morning Post Snowden revealed details of how the NSA hacks into computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong.49 The obvious result of this is to damage America and its allies.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“The Snowden revelations have also exposed the fact that senior officials, particularly America's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, have not been fully frank with Congress.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster