Luke Harding Quotes

#1. Taking your clothes off in front of strangers is something of a hobby in Germany, among both men and women, especially in the former communist East, where it was one of the few freedoms allowed.

Luke Harding

#2. The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin's critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.

Luke Harding

#3. Strict shopping laws mean that most German shops close on Saturday afternoons, reopening only on Monday when everybody is back at work.

Luke Harding

#4. By August 2008, we had left Voikovskaya and moved into a wooden dacha in the artists' colony of Sokol in north-west Moscow. The house was a haven amid the madness of the city: lily of the valley grew near our front gate, Virginia creeper decked the green picket fence.

Luke Harding

#5. Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.

Luke Harding

#6. On 30 June 2010, the FSB broke into my office again. They unplugged the Internet, opened the window and left the phone off the hook, placing it next to my laptop. The message was clear: we are still here.

Luke Harding

#7. Notionally a left-wing movement, the Anti-Germans were born after the collapse of the Berlin wall. While most Germans rejoiced at the end of the Cold War, the Anti-Germans feared that a united Germany might lead to a fourth Reich - and a return of anti-Semitism.

Luke Harding

#8. Two decades after communism and the alleged end of the Cold War, Russia is still a cash economy. The preferred currency is dollars, though euros are also acceptable.

Luke Harding

#9. Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website

Luke Harding

#10. 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

#11. By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

Luke Harding

#12. I first visited Kurdistan in 2003. I arrived in the town of Sulaimaniyah, courtesy of smugglers who drove me across the border from Iran. Sulaimaniyah was a small, charming provincial Kurdish town.

Luke Harding

#13. The FSB's invisible presence continued; the agency became an intangible part of my Moscow life - sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, with someone in a back room clearly turning the volume of minor persecution up and down.

Luke Harding

#14. I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam's forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul - where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures - then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

Luke Harding

#15. There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide.

Luke Harding

#16. 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

#17. 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.

Luke Harding

#18. Snowden was extremely good at digital self-defense. When he was employed by the C.I.A. and N.S.A., one of his jobs was to teach U.S. national security officials and C.I.A. employees how to protect their data in high-threat digital environments.

Luke Harding