24 Quotes by Luke Harding

Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.

In fact, the aim is to blur what is true with what is not, to the point that the truth disappears altogether. By noisily asserting that something is false, you create a fake counter-reality. In time this constructed sovereign version of events becomes real- at least in the minds of those who are watching.

Do we want to live in a controlled society or do we want to live in a free society? That’s the fundamental question we’re being faced with.’ EDWARD SNOWDEN.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland observes that Britain ‘has a fundamentally different conception of power to, say, the United States’. It doesn’t have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution, or the American idea that ‘we the people’ are sovereign. Rather, the British system still bears the ‘imprint of its origins in monarchy’, with power emanating from the top and flowing downwards. Britons remain subjects rather than citizens. Hence their lack of response towards government intrusion.

Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.