Luke Harding (1) (1968–)

Guardian journalist Luke Harding's book is an in-depth look at the Trump family, their dealings with Russia before and during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the extent to which the Russian government and major financial institutions like Deutsche Bank are involved in worldwide financial corruption and money laundering. Harding does an excellent job at taking the disjointed, murky, and often financially complex pieces of information about what happened and shaping a coherent show more narrative from them. Coherent, and damning, and likely just the tip of the iceberg. It's ever more amazing to me just how viciously the American electorate cut off its own nose in order to spite its face last year—and to think that maybe a century from now, some poor history graduate student will likely be writing a footnote citing video of an American president soliciting a golden shower from Russian prostitutes as part of a dissertation on a presidency that will surely go down in infamy. show less

Luke Harding is a reporter for The Guardian who has lived in and reported from Russia and written about the Litvinenko murder since it happened in 2006. This is an in-depth retelling of events, up to nearly the present.

The murder takes place early on in the book and it feels like a thriller, not surprising since Arthurt Conan Doyle is a favorite author of one of the Russian killers. The poison used is the rare periodic element polonium (atomic number 84) estimated to have cost over 15 show more million dollars to manufacture for a few grams. It was enough to kill 50 million people. Because it gives off alpha instead of beta radiation only the military has detectors and it might have been the perfect crime. However British sleuths finally figured it out and the whole evil plot exposed with all evidence pointing back to Putin. This was the legal finding by the top British court.

Litvinenko was killed because he had information linking Putin to organized crime. He was a threat to the Russian mafia state. The Litvinenko story is something of a classic in modern espionage and this is probably as good a book you will find on it. It's also damned unsettling the Putin regime can kill anyone, anywhere, anytime and get away with it. show less

This is an amazing account of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and his leak of intelligence documents to the press concerning the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs conducted against nearly all U.S. citizens, as well as those abroad, even including heads of state of allied countries. This release sparked debates worldwide about the needs for mass surveillance that infringe on our civil liberties and rights to privacy, as well as the need for a free press. Shockingly, the show more country even more zealous than ours in seeing this situation resolved in favor of its intelligence community was Britain, who citizens do not have a Bill of Rights with freedom of speech and the press to protect them from such invasive actions. The claims that all of this is necessary in the fight against terrorism lacks strength when no one can prove that even one terrorist attack has been thwarted due to these practices. As I write this I am in horror that because it is being posted on the Internet, I can be put on some government watch list simply because I commend Snowden for his actions in making us all aware of what our government has been doing to us. Making this worse is the fact that he was forced to seek asylum in Russia of all places because he is safer there! We have much to be ashamed of. I think of Snowden as being similar to Daniel Ellsberg and hope that our government does the responsible thing – enact meaningful curbs on such intelligence gathering with realistic oversight and brings Snowden home to the U.S.A. I can’t wait to see the movie. show less

Radio and TV coverage of the Snowden leaks were spotty. This book helped to fill in the details, background, and what happened since Snowden showed up in Moscow. Snowden himself, and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, are fleshed out a little more, and I learned why an American would go to British journalists, the Guardian, with the information he had purloined. It turns out the British, specifically their top-secret telecommunications monitoring arm, GCHQ, collaborated with the NSA: “We have show more the brains: they have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.” [Sir David Omand, Former GCHQ Director] No shortage of egoism and despotism to go around, then.

Snowden was a right-wing libertarian in early writings on the web as a user he called ‘TheTrueHOOHA’. It was frankly unsettling for me to read/listen to his thinking as a teen, and see his progression to action. To use his words, he would like to be viewed as a patriot who believes in the right to privacy enshrined in the U.S. constitution. When I’d first learned of his leaks, I was startled. Listening to his first interview on TV, I was admiring. After reading this book, I am unsettled.

Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter, outlines the Snowden action for us with a minimum of sensationalism but with some incredulity at the scope of the revelations. And the news is pretty sensational. Harding gives a little background into Snowden’s early development, and his foray into working as a U.S. government contractor specializing in the protection of U.S. government communications. Snowden’s amazed and amazing reach into the lives of others via their private data transfers must vindicate the paranoid. While I have my doubts that any world leader or business executive thought their telecommunications were truly secret, Snowden’s revelations are startling in the scope of the data collection and in the holes in the system, e.g., a relatively low-level contractor had access to the material.

I should probably state from the get-go that I do not fear my government. I grew up in an age where inaction was much more to be expected than action; incompetence and bureaucratic bungling was much more common than overreach. I was not subject to the kind of totalitarian control experienced in Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviet Union, or China, but we have those examples to know it can happen. I believe the president and his minions who claim that the government is not listening to the communications of private citizens. They simply do not have the capacity, nor the interest, to do that. However, they now apparently have the means, and individuals within governments can have a deleterious effect upon the stated objectives of government. Snowden has shown us a place where an individual might have an outsized effect to his purported role.

Knowing just what I know now, if I had to make a judgment on Snowden’s fate, I might say he should go to court congruently with the leadership of the NSA and the GCHQ. I don’t think it would have been possible for him to “go up the chain of command” to protest this data collection. It is ridiculous to contemplate that anyone would have listened to him, given the reaction from our fearless leaders upon learning of his revelations. But I wish things had gone differently…for him and for us.

I listened to the Random House Audio version of this title, very ably read by Nicholas Guy Smith. I had a look at the paper copy as well, and found it concise enough that the momentum never lagged. Since Guardian reporters were the ones that initially broke this story, it is reasonable that they are the ones to write the details of what happened and the follow-up. I can’t imagine there is a person out there who wouldn’t be interested in this topic. Inform yourselves. This is going to be a political topic for some years to come. show less