Taking On The Snowdenistas

Edward Lucas offers a piece on NSA leaker Edward Snowden in the Wall Street Journal.

Most of my media colleagues think Edward Snowden is a saint and proto-martyr. The fugitive NSA contractor has bravely exposed American spy agencies' tricks and mischief. But the theft and publication of secret documents is not a heroic campaign. At best it is reckless self-indulgence, and at worst sabotage and treason.

 

Mr. Snowden has not proved systematic abuse by the NSA or partner agencies. The PowerPoint slides he stole are for the most part ambiguous and out-of-date. His story has been told naively and hysterically, with a huge dose of hypocrisy.

 

Espionage is inherently disreputable: It involves stealing secrets. Enemies of the West—notably Russia and China—are spying on us. France runs a mighty industrial espionage service. Germany has an excellent signals intelligence agency, the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung.

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224.html

Note: In my view, Snowden is a sneak thief, spy and traitor.

Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today

Joseph C. Goulden, the noted journalist, author and authority on espionage, reviewed Edward Lucas' intersting book Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today for the Washington Times. 
*
Much of the media, both domestic and foreign, found considerable merriment in the June 2010 announcement of the arrest and expulsion of 10 Russian intelligence agents who were in the United States as “sleeper agents” — that is, spies who would be dormant while they posed as unremarkable civilians and wormed their ways into positions where they could obtain valuable information
*
... David Cornwell, who writes spy thrillers under the name John le Carre, went so far as to suggest that out-of-control “rightists” in American intelligence agencies were trying to derail the “improvement” (an odd choice of words, given reality) in Russian-American relations.
*

 ... But Edward Lucas, who is fast emerging as the most able nonfiction espionage writer of his generation, argues that Russia’s dispatch of the sleeper agents “is not a laughing matter.” For more than two decades, Mr. Lucas covered Russia and Eastern Europe for the Economist, and he has documented the descent of Vladimir Putin’s regime into a new authoritarianism and its increasing hostility toward the United States. He writes with authority.

* 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 *

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/15/book-review-deception/