Edward Lucas

“More importantly in my view, the Obama administration has treated whistleblowers with scandalous harshness, especially those from inside the intelligence community. The…

— Edward Lucas

“The single biggest lesson of the whole Snowden fiasco is that America's own sloppiness made it vulnerable: whether to misguided whistleblowers, saboteurs…

— Edward Lucas

“The Snowden revelations have also exposed the fact that senior officials, particularly America's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, have not been…

— Edward Lucas

“The idea that the material is safe because it is encrypted is shockingly naïve: it is child's play for a sophisticated adversary…

— Edward Lucas

“The Kremlin also is determined, along with China, to wrest control of the internet from the American-based committees which run it now.…

— Edward Lucas

“It is only a mild caricature to say that the presumption behind the leaks is that the intelligence agencies in the West…

— Edward Lucas

“It is important not to concentrate the defence case too narrowly on terrorism. That is a grave threat, but not the only…

— Edward Lucas

“Relationships have decayed; trust has ebbed. This is not a new problem. George W Bush's administration made a bonfire of American soft…

— Edward Lucas

“The Snowdenistas' exaggeration stems from a conflation of self-criticism with self-hatred. In their eyes, democracy, the rule of law and constitutional government…

— Edward Lucas

“Rahul Sagar, a professor at Princeton, has defined these well in his new book Secrets and Leaks:73 First, a whistleblower must have…

— Edward Lucas

“I freely admit that it is possible that Snowden conceived his plan on his own, and with honourable if mistaken motives. It…

— Edward Lucas

“Perhaps the gravest charge was that America conflated commercial espionage with statecraft. That would be shocking if true. It would be illegal…

— Edward Lucas

“If the NSA is able to intercept the communications of a top Russian politician, surely it deserves praise (in private), not censure…

— Edward Lucas

“The NSA and allies scamper through the plumbing of the internet like mice through the nooks and crannies of an old house.…

— Edward Lucas

“The members of the committee were aware of the programmes concerned, having been briefed on them in classified sessions. The question was,…

— Edward Lucas

“The recklessness, damage, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and…

— Edward Lucas

“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…

— Edward Lucas

“Nothing evinced so far justifies the catastrophic damage that the Snowden leaks have done to national security—the worst disaster in the history…

— Edward Lucas

“But to portray the NSA and its partner services, as Greenwald does, as akin to East Germany's Stasi, or to the KGB,…

— Edward Lucas

“Nobody has proved that the NSA or GCHQ committed grave and deliberate breaches of the law. In the big scandals of the…

— Edward Lucas

“The quite unnecessary damage caused by Snowden makes it hard to believe that his aim was solely to expose wrongdoing. It looks…

— Edward Lucas

“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Snowden conducted his activities within the NSA in order to be as damaging as…

— Edward Lucas