The Snowden Operation Quotes

“The Snowdenistas' exaggeration stems from a conflation of self-criticism with self-hatred. In their eyes, democracy, the rule of law and constitutional government have been so eroded that the West carries no moral weight at all. The authorities are capable of anything, so it is sensible to assume that they do what they are capable of. Why would they stop?”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“This is not an approach that would be tolerated in other forms of protest. Anti-nuclear activists may blockade power stations or weapons facilities. Even they would regard it as irresponsible to try to sabotage them, aiming to cause maximum damage, in the expectation that the resulting debate will outweigh the harm done.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“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

“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 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

“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

“I freely admit that it is possible that Snowden conceived his plan on his own, and with honourable if mistaken motives. It may well be that his allies are without exception enthusiastic and careless but not actually malevolent. It may be that Russia has watched the whole affair with bemusement, was reluctant to offer asylum, and is eager for him to leave. It is possible that Vladimir Putin is entirely sincere, if ineffective, when he says he wants no damage to be done to America as a result of Snowden's sojourn. It is all possible.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, is a notable public figure, and founder of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, a pro-Kremlin think-tank which aims to counter Western propaganda on human rights. He is on the 'Public Council' (a kind of advisory board) of the FSB, Russia's domestic security service.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“Rahul Sagar, a professor at Princeton, has defined these well in his new book Secrets and Leaks:73 First, a whistleblower must have clear and convincing evidence of abuse. Second, releasing the information must not pose a disproportionate threat to public safety. Third, the information leaked must be as limited in scope and scale as possible. Snowden failed all three of these criteria. He has not shown systematic abuse, only secrecy and mistakes. He has harmed and weakened his country and its allies (indeed, for some Snowdenistas, this is a stated aim). He has stolen far more information than was necessary to make the case he purports to want to make. Why?”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“Perhaps the gravest charge was that America conflated commercial espionage with statecraft. That would be shocking if true. It would be illegal under American law. It would confer unfair advantages on the lucky US companies that received intelligence titbits from the government, and disadvantage their competitors. It would discredit America's reputation for fair dealing in the eyes of the rest of the world.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“The quite unnecessary damage caused by Snowden makes it hard to believe that his aim was solely to expose wrongdoing. It looks far more likely that he was trying to cripple the NSA and its allies, and to hurt America's standing in the world.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Snowden conducted his activities within the NSA in order to be as damaging as possible. Among the so far unpublished material are (by the NSA's account) 31,000 files which show what government customers asked the agency to find out about countries such as China, Iran and Russia, and its assessments of how it could respond. These 'shopping lists' are among the most closely guarded secrets in any intelligence agency.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“The idea that the material is safe because it is encrypted is shockingly naïve: it is child's play for a sophisticated adversary to place malware on a computer, remotely and invisibly, which logs every key stroke, and records everything that appears on the screen. Such 'end-point vulnerabilities' render even the heaviest encryption pointless. They can be delivered via a mobile phone or through an internet connection (or by some other subtle and secret means). Snowden knows this. It is possible that someone with his technical skills could keep the stolen data secure on his own computers, at least for a time and if he does not switch them on. But that becomes ever less likely over time.”
― 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

“The members of the committee were aware of the programmes concerned, having been briefed on them in classified sessions. The question was, in a sense, a trap, aimed at bouncing Clapper into revealing more than he wanted. But for all that, as a member of the executive branch, he is under a solemn duty not to mislead the legislature—or to mislead citizens who are observing its questioning of their government officials. For whatever mixture of motives or confusion, he breached that duty. He apologised later, pleading confusion not deliberate deceit. Though charges that he 'perjured' himself or deliberately lied to Congress are an exaggeration, in his place I think I would have resigned.”
― 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

“More importantly in my view, the Obama administration has treated whistleblowers with scandalous harshness, especially those from inside the intelligence community. The hardest point for critics of Snowden is to explain what he should have done with his worries had he chosen to stay within the system.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“The recklessness, damage, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and warehousing of meta-data was overdue.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“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

“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

“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

“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 NSA and allies scamper through the plumbing of the internet like mice through the nooks and crannies of an old house. Huge slices of electronic traffic can be warehoused for days or even weeks. Powerful computers and ingenious algorithms can search for patterns and connections in a way that only recently would have seemed unimaginable.37 The outline of these efforts was already known before the Snowden leaks, even if the code-names and techniques were not.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster