Tom

“It is only a mild caricature to say that the presumption behind the leaks is that the intelligence agencies in the West are the greatest threat to freedom on the planet.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“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

“The Kremlin also is determined, along with China, to wrest control of the internet from the American-based committees which run it now. It wants the internet to be under governmental control, with an entrenched right for national authorities to promote 'information security'—a concept which sounds anodyne or even reassuring to Western ears, but in practice would allow authoritarian governments to censor and control their subjects' diet of information. In both Russia and China misuse of social media, for example, is perceived as a significant national security issue requiring extensive active and passive efforts by the authorities.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster