Luke Harding Quotes
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.
Harding, Luke. The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man. Vintage Books, 2014.
See {635177} for the event that triggered the statement.
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
Major leaks made public the fact that the NSA was hacking into the European and other foreign servers of Google, Microsoft and other technology companies and vacuuming up 500 million internet communications every day. (It would be illegal for them to do this in the United States, but via the outside USA servers they capture the information of US Citizens sending E-mail within the United States. The reaction of many foreign government was outrage as their citizen’s private communications were being captured as well. They began to take steps to curtain their country’s high utilization of American company data storage and transmission and regulate the American firms much more extensively. So American company business and profits were damaged by the NSA surveillance programs which the companies did not know about.
The NSA had been publicly exposed (by the Edward Snowden leaks) as collecting data on virtually every American’s phone and on-line conversation, and criticism was rampant.
Luke Daniel Harding is a British journalist who is a foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He was based in Russia for The Guardian from 2007 until, returning from a stay in the UK on 5 February 2011, he was refused re-entry to Russia and deported the same day. The Guardian said his expulsion was linked with his critical articles on Russia, a claim denied by the Russian government. After the reversal of the decision on 9 February and the granting of a short-term visa, Harding chose not to seek a further visa extension. His 2011 book Mafia State discusses his experience in Russia and the political system under Vladimir Putin, which he describes as a mafia state.
