Quotes from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden’s itinerary does, however, seem to bear the fingerprints of Julian Assange. Assange was often quick to criticise the US and other western nations when they abused human rights. But he was reluctant to speak out against governments that supported his personal efforts to avoid extradition.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“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.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm. The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“As much as 25 per cent of the world’s current internet traffic crosses British territory via the cables, en route between the US, Europe, Africa and all points east. Much of the remaining traffic has landing or departure points in the US. So between them Britain and the US play host to most of the planet’s burgeoning data flows.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“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”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The encounter demonstrated the difference between newspaper cultures on either side of the pond. In the US, three big newspapers enjoy a virtual monopoly. With little competition, they are free to pursue leads at a leisurely, even gentlemanly, pace. The political culture is different too, with the press generally deferential towards the president. If anyone asked Obama a tough or embarrassing question, this was itself”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“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.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Barack Obama, in a 2007 stump speech for his nascent presidential campaign, had pledged, ‘No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more National Security Letters to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do no more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The oversight mechanism in the US may have been broken, but in Russia it didn’t exist.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“By the time of the GDR’s demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“His girlfriend of eight years, Lindsay Mills, joined him in June on Oahu, which means ‘the gathering place’. Mills grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, and had been living with Snowden in Japan.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Excruciatingly, Obama’s fellow Nobel Laureates turned on him as well. More”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“himself vehemently denies this. Putin’s own attitude towards whistleblowing activities was undoubtedly negative. He later described Snowden as a stranniy paren – a strange bloke. ‘In effect, he condemned himself to a rather difficult life. I do not have the faintest idea what he will do next,’ he said. Putin was a KGB officer who served in communist East Germany in the 1980s, and was the former head”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The US’s main clandestine objective in Mexico was to keep tabs on the country’s drug cartels. A”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“the easy bit – passing the material to sympathetic journalists – was proving tricky.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“With the surveillance issue now so obviously toxic the Obama administration did something it was good at: it sat on the fence.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“It began with an email. ‘I am a senior member of the intelligence community …”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden was alert to the possibility that foreign intelligence services would seek his files, and was determined to prevent this. As a spy, one of his jobs had been to defend American secrets from Chinese attack. He knew the capabilities of America’s foes. Snowden made clear repeatedly that he didn’t want to damage US intelligence operations abroad. ‘I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions … If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. That was never my intention,’ he said. He”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The agency had set up fake local internet cafes equipped with key-logging software. This allowed GCHQ to hack delegates’ passwords, which could be exploited later. GCHQ also penetrated their BlackBerrys to monitor email messages and phone calls. A team of 45 analysts kept a real-time log of who phoned whom during the summit. Turkey’s finance minister and 15 other members of his delegation were among the targets. This had, of course, nothing whatever to do with terrorism. The”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden called the NSA ‘self-certifying’. In the debate over who ruled the internet, the NSA provided a dismaying answer: ‘We do.’ The slides, given to Poitras and published by Der Spiegel magazine, show that the NSA had developed techniques to hack into iPhones. The agency assigned specialised teams to work on other smartphones too, such as Android. It targeted BlackBerry, previously regarded as the impregnable device of choice for White House aides. The NSA can hoover up photos and voicemail. It can hack Facebook, Google Earth and Yahoo Messenger. Particularly useful is geo-data, which locates where a target has been and when. The agency collects billions of records a day showing the location of mobile phone users across the world. It sifts them – using powerful analytics – to discover ‘co-travellers’. These are previously unknown associates of a target. Another”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Nick Hopkins, the Guardian’s investigations editor, had liaison with the intelligence agencies as one of his regular tasks. After the TEMPORA disclosures, Hopkins suggested a peace meeting with a GCHQ official to clear the air. He replied: ‘I would rather gouge my eyes out than be seen with you.’ Hopkins responded: ‘If you do that you won’t be able to read our next scoop.’ Another GCHQ staffer suggested – with tongue in cheek – that he should consider emigration to Australia. The”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The NSA’s original mission was to collect foreign intelligence. But it appears to have drifted away from its original goal, like a vast supertanker floating away from its anchor. It is now sucking in a lot of domestic communications. In this new era of Big Data, the agency moved from the specific to the general; from foreign targeting to what Snowden called ‘omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance’. The”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“ProPublica’s technology reporter Jeff Larson joined the bunker in London. A computer science graduate, Larson knew his stuff. Using diagrams, he could explain the NSA’s complex data-mining programs – no mean feat.”
― Luke Harding, quote from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

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Popular quotes

“An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, quote from Station Eleven

“Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You cannot undo yesterday's journey.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Magic

“Seth put his ear against the door. "I can't hear anything."

"There are probably ten of them patiently waiting on the far side, ready to pounce."

Brownies are shrimps. All I'd need are some heavy boots, a pair of shin guards, and a weed whacker."

The image made Kendra giggle.”
― Brandon Mull, quote from Grip of the Shadow Plague

“I must try to enjoy all the graces that God has given me today. Grace cannot be hoarded. There are no banks where it can be deposited to be used when I feel more at peace with myself. If I do not make full use of these blessings, I will lose them forever.

God knows that we are all artists of life. One day, he gives us a hammer with which to make sculptures, another day he gives us brushes and paints with which to make a picture, or paper and a pencil to write with. But you cannot make a painting with a hammer, or a sculpture with a paintbrush. Therefore, however difficult it may be, I must accept today's small blessings, even if they seem like curses because I am suffering and it's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, and the children are singing in the street. This is the only way I will manage to leave my pain behind and rebuild my life.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from The Zahir

“The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from Three Comrades

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