Ajakirjanik

I organised a "Solidarity with Solidarity" campaign in London in 1981, and did as much as I could help dissidents and anti-communist causes. I was one of very few Western freelance journalists living behind the Iron Curtain. Getting the news out helped break the Communist information blockade.

Thanks, I started this with the help of an ace-techie, in the form of my son Johnny. He has gone out to buy some eggs and I am finding this a bit stressful. I am not sure about the upvoting and downvoting. Please bear with me if I am making mistakes.

I disagree. I think he did not expose systematic wrongdoing by the NSA. He showed that it makes mistakes, which is not the same thing. The "Snowdenistas" do not seem to realise the damage he has done. They are too paranoid about their own Western governments, and too trusting about Russia, the country where Snowden arrived so strangely and lives so secretly

I think Yeltsin was a great man in some ways but gravely flawed in others. He did not understand the corrosive effects of corruption. He did not really understand the importance of institutions in a capitalist economy. (To be fair, many other people were making mistakes at the time too). The Chechen war was a terrible mistake. He also failed to see that the KGB had not been truly destroyed (as we now see all too clearly). On the other hand he did help the Soviet Union to break up more or less peacefully.

the details are in my book. But 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? Why is it in the public interest to reveal how the NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, or to show that the agency is intensifying scrutiny on the security of that country’s nuclear weapons? Snowden even revealed details of how the NSA hacks into computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong.