Tom

“Nobody has proved that the NSA or GCHQ committed grave and deliberate breaches of the law. In the big scandals of the 1960s, the FBI illegally bugged American citizens and tried to blackmail the government's political opponents. For example, it wanted to make Martin Luther King commit suicide, by threatening him with the exposure of his adultery. No comparable examples have been produced now, and I do not believe any will be. Nobody has produced individual victims of illegal NSA activity. There is no evidence of wilful, systematic breaches of the law by the NSA, or of contempt within its ranks, at any level, for judicial and legislative oversight. There is no modern counterpart of J Edgar Hoover, the brooding madman who brought the FBI to its darkest hour.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“It is important not to concentrate the defence case too narrowly on terrorism. That is a grave threat, but not the only one. Invoking the attacks of September 11th 2001 as justification for everything the NSA does can be a powerful defence, but it wears out with over-use. It invites pointed questions, like how many terrorists did you catch by trawling meta-data?”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“The right-wingers want to stop the clock entirely, you know, and one of these times they’ll make it. Then the pendulum won’t come back at all. That’s what Orwell was talking about.”
― Timothy J. Culver, Ex Officio

“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