Edward Snowden - to Russia with love (Edward Lucas)
Saturday, Jan 25, 2014, 8:31 IST
... My new book, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster, depicts him as at best a "useful idiot", whose actions serve our enemies. The theft and publication of secret documents is not a heroic campaign but reckless self-indulgence with disastrous consequences. For all the media hype in The Guardian, the BBC and elsewhere, Snowden's published material does not prove systematic, sinister wrongdoing or abuse by the NSA or its British counterpart, GCHQ. The typical revelation consists of Powerpoint slides showing how the agency bugs, snoops, and searches the vast warehouses of information it collects. But the revelations come devoid of context ...
A list of countries that would trust Germany or France not to spy on them would be rather shorter. Snowden's published revelations include material that has nothing to do with his purported worries about personal privacy. They reveal how countries like Norway and Sweden spy on Russia. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how democracies spy on dictatorships?
The Snowdenistas' outrage is based on the fact that this spying takes place in cooperation with the NSA, the fount of all evil. Other disclosures are similarly hard to justify. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how the NSA intercepts emails, phone calls and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, or to show that the agency is scrutinising the security of that country's nuclear weapons? Snowden even revealed details of the NSA hacking computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong. The result is to cast a distorting and damaging light on agencies' work ...
What gives the Snowdenistas and their media allies the right to leak our most closely guarded and expensive secrets? To be fair, the recklessness, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and warehousing of meta-data (details, for example, about the location, duration, direction of a phone call, but not its content) was overdue. Collected and scrutinised, meta-data can breach privacy: if you know who called a suicide-prevention helpline, from where and when, the content matters less than the circumstances. The revelations have also shown that intelligence agencies make mistakes, that they operate up to the limits of their political, judicial and regulatory constraints, and that they sometimes clash with lawmakers and judges ...
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-edward-snowden-to-russia-with-love-1956660
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Last edited Sun Jan 26, 2014, 11:13 AM - Edit history (1)
who by his last book is obviously obsessed with cold war politics as explanatory?
Snowdenistas? Seriously?
'Recklessness, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp'? As a trained psychologist, I detect a great deal of projection here. 
Where do you guys get this stuff? Am I on DU or Free Republic? Sometimes it appears to be hard to tell when really it is no longer about Republicans or Democrats but apparently authoritarians, their true believers, and us versus them playground politics.
The only thing he even begins to get right is the discussion on meta data. But if he genuinely takes that seriously, how can he support his own claims? Snowden, for good or ill, with his actions started this long overdue public discussion about the limits of intelligence gathering, the violations of the United States Constitution, and whole-sale siphoning and us of data AND meta data from an unsuspecting public.
