Glenn Greenwald doesn’t want to abdicate, still willing to smash to smithereens the “toxic habits” of media. We met him in Rio for an exclusive interview.

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From the morros of Rio de Janeiro, Glenn Greenwald, 46, has been publishing his revelations on a daily basis for five months. The former lawyer and blogger turned combat journalist for The Guardian eventually became a media superstar. Edward Snowden, the former NSA analyst, provided him with the documents which help him reveal how the most secret of intelligence agency is spying on the world.

The most prominent newspapers (Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, The New York Times…) are working tirelessly on his documents : the US government, for their part, would like to get them back.

Glenn Greenwald meets us at the bar of an international hotel of São Conrado, a chic neighborhood of his adoptive city, wearing flip-flops and a bathing suit. He explains to us why and how he became the one spurring the scandal, as well as its echo chamber. While drinking a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and eating fried calamari ordered with a perfect portuguese accent, he tells us the background the year's most important story… and how he almost missed it.

Hyperactive, talkative, sometimes vituperative, the journalist criticizes the current security drift of the United States towards securitarianism, and the “toxic habits” of media he’s willing to smash to smithereens, so as to bring about a revolution. He doesn’t want to abdicate, even though he was ostracized from his country. After a few weeks of talks, Obama's administration's number one-and-a-half enemy has agreed to meet us.

Are you afraid ?

I’m aware of the risks, even physical, of being in possession of thousands of documents that various intelligence agencies around the world would prefer to have in their hands. It’s the biggest leak in national security history, the US government feels they’ve totally lost control of it, that they’ve been undermined in so many ways, and there is a lot of pressure inside the USG to punish somebody for this, to put somebody’s head on a pike, which is how they deter other people from doing this kind of challenges.

And the person they’d like to get is not available because he’s in Russia, protected by the Russian government, so I’m the next best person [in a recent interview, Attorney General Eric Holder denied any prosecution plan against Greenwald, editor's note].

Are the american authorities trying to put pressure on you ?

Putting my partner in custody and not letting him leave for nine hours under a terrorism law, constantly suggesting that there is a criminal investigation, is a form of intimidation. The US administration admitted anonymously to Reuters the following day that the point was to “send a message”.

They are linking the publication of these documents to terrorism and espionage by distorting reality : Keith Alexander, the NSA boss, the 4-star general, called what we’re doing “selling documents”, which is something that can send you to prison for the rest of your life if you actually do it.

“I refuse to be kept out

of my own country

for doing journalism.”

Do you think you can come back to the US ?

The irony is I’ve been living here for eight years, and originally it was because we didn’t have an option to live in the US, because there was this law that was barring my partner from getting immigration benefit. And now the law has now been struck down two months ago, but we still can’t go back because of the questions surrounding my legal status. I do feel a bit on exile but I don’t mean to stay away from the US. I wanna force the issue at some point. I refuse to be kept out of my own country for doing journalism.

Hopefully, Brazil have been very supportive. The government of Dilma Roussef said in the media that they’ll protect me against the USG, and the brazilian Senate voted to offer a security protection at our home. I’ve been stopped constantly in the streets here by people showing how grateful they are, especially since I’ve appeared on the big television show Fantastico, on Globo.

What are the consequences on your daily life ?

I know for a fact that I’m under constant electronic surveillance, I don’t talk on the phone about anything remotely sensitive, and I only use sophisticated forms of encryption. I use multiple computers including air gaps, disconnected computers of different OS for different purposes to maximize security.

Some friends of mine won’t email me, because they worry to be implicated in some way, and I noticed that people who email me are much shorter and allusive. When people visit me here, they wonder if they should take their computers, when they leave, they erase their hard drive just in case it gets seized.

Recently, I played a tennis tournament. The big joke was to say “oh nobody should play doubles with him”. It’s half joking, but it proves that it enters people’s minds and there’s a real fear of being associated with me.

Do you sometimes hope to get back to a form of routine ?

I keep hoping for it (laughing), that my life get back to normal at some point. And yet, every time I think there is a chance, it fails. It’s fine, because normalcy is not the best value, but as a human being, you want to be able to keep a balance.

You wanna make sure your physical and mental health are OK, that you’re being cared for, that there are other things that motivate you, and I’ve been devoted to it. I’ve been sleeping four or five hours a night, which is unealthy. I try to go back to exercising, I’ve been resuming yoga after a three-month break, I spend time with my partner, we escaped for the weekend a couple of times, I spend time with my dogs…

“You really have to

make the choice

not to be paranoid.”

As we speak right now, do you think we’re spied on ?

I can always find suspicious looking people. Sometimes they’re just weird, sometimes I’m just paranoid, other times it’s because they are actually surveilling me. You really have to make the choice not to be paranoid. It’s constraining not to be able to have a free conversation, but there’s nothing I can do about it. When I speak with my partner, I know there is a strong possibility that our car or our house are under electronic surveillance, so we’re careful even in the privacy of our home. It’s a burden but it’s manageable.

Why did Edward Snowden choose you ? How did your collaboration start ?

He wrote me an email in december 2012. He was very vague about who he was, what he wanted and what he had. He just asked me to install this encryption software so we can communicate in private. Installing such thing was something I intended to do, because I’ve worked a lot with WikiLeaks and Anonymous, but I never took the time to do it because I wasn’t very good and interested in it. I told him I was going to do it, but every time I woke up, it wasn’t at the top of my priorities.

I have people contacting me all the time, and I wasn’t even thinking if he was worth it. 99%, it appears to be trivial, petty stories. One in a million is Edward Snowden. He was very understated, and retrospectively, that’s how he is all the time. So at some point he actually wrote this step by step guide to explain me how to do it. Again, I just ignored it. Then he created a video for me, that explained to me clic by clic, but I still didn’t do it. At this point, he became frustrated, which I understand. Why would you give the biggest leak in national security history to a guy who is unable to install the software to get it ? That’s when he went to Laura Poitras (a german filmmaker working on surveillance matters). And she told him he should work with… me.

After ten years as a lawyer defending civil liberties, I started to write about the radical turn of american politics, this idea that since 9/11, they have the power to do whatever they wanna do without any legal limit. So I opened this blog, Unclaimed Territory, in October 2005. Snowden was looking for someone who would publish the documents aggressively, who knew surveillance matters, and who wouldn’t be intimidated. He was really worried that he would unravel his whole life, take this huge risk, and go to The New York Times that would sit on his story because the government told them to.

So you finally installed this software…

Laura helped me, and I was able to talk to Snowden by mid-may. At the time, he was already in Hongkong, which got us very confused. He was really insistant that we go there. I said I needed to see some documents before I take a plane to the other side of the world. He sent me two dozens of documents that were shocking and amazing. I could immediately see he was very serious, and the next day I got on a plane to New York. I met with my editors at The Guardian and then I flew to Hongkong.

“Snowden told me that

he feared that the public would

react with indifference.”

Are you satisfied with the public reaction ?

One of the first things Snowden told me is that he feared that the public would react with indifference. Here we are, five months later, and it’s still the biggest news story in the world. It has caused multiples breaches, diplomatically, politically, it revolutionized the value of privacy, Internet freedom, the role of the US. It changed dynamics of the world and went far beyond my wildest expectations. Overwhelmingly, the reaction of the government proves it, people have taken these revelations very seriously.

They have an instinct of understanding about privacy, even those who say they have nothing to hide. They put passwords on social networks, they put locks on their bathroom doors, because they understand the value of it. Every time someone tells me they have nothing to hide, I answer “please, email me all of your passwords, let me put webcams in your bedrooms and leave them on 24/7”. People do react when they see that everything they do can be monitored.

Over the past six months, my email inbox went from 5% of emails attached with PGP keys to 60 or 70% of encrypted emails. More and more news organizations are using it, like Forbes or The New Yorker, so it’s raising consciousness to re-establish some privacy. And I think some people will come with new tools to protect privacy, to give people the ability to communicate in private without the interference of the state.

How many documents are still to be published ?

The majority hasn’t been reported yet. We talk about it regularly with Snowden over an encrypted chat. The bar has been raised so high that I can’t really say the worse is yet to come – it’s harder to shock people who get used to it – but there are some elements about what the NSA collect and how they do it that are going to be shocking. I’m sitting on this pile of documents, and each of them is newsworthy.

I’ve been contacted by journalists in every country of the world, constantly calling to ask me if I can work on it with them. The problem is, legally, I can’t just hand documents to them, otherwise I would become a source. I can’t become a source within a source, I can only be a journalist, so that means the only way I can work with them is to contribute to the reporting and go through the documents myself. This is really time-consuming, but I feel guilty that I can’t report on these things fast enough. So I’ve hired an assistant.

Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for providing documents to WikiLeaks. Is it still possible to protect a source, 100% ?

The government is collecting every single communication, so that means they know everybody is communicating with everybody else, how long, how frequently, when, by which means… Today, it’s almost impossible for a source to come to a journalist with anonimity, without getting detected.

There were a staff reporter from The Guardian, who worked in DC for years who, once we started reporting, said he couldn’t get anybody to call us back, because they didn’t want to appear on metadata level as affiliated to The Guardian. Surveillance has completely destroyed the news gathering process, and it’s a strong side effect.

“There’s some kind of

contagiousness of courage,

and whistleblowers tend to inspire

other people to become one.”

Moreover, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other US administration before. Do you fear we could lack candidates to sacrifice ?

When you create such a situation, where you can only be a whistleblower if you’re willing to risk decades in prison, if not life, less and less people will do it. Despite this deterrence strategy, Snowden saw everything that happened to Manning and still, he went for it. There’s some kind of contagiousness of courage, and whistleblowers tend to inspire other people to become one. It’s a process the government almost can’t stop.

On some level, the more agressive they get, the more likely it is that other people will come forward, because the more the state shows how abusive it is, the more compelling people will think it is that it needs to be challenged. In Honkgkong, Laura and I saw how fearless Snowden’s choice was, and we agreed to do justice to his courage by reporting the story in the same spirit. The Guardian, when they first thought about publishing the story, had the normal posture of any traditional institution : what are the risks ? Then, the more they got infected by my spirit and Snowden’s one, the more courageous they became too. It created a ripple effect.

You became very well-known thanks to this scandal…

Since the very beginning, we decided that I was going to be the one engaging the public debate and speaking on TV. Laura hates doing any kind of media because she prefers to stay behind the camera, and we knew Snowden wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want the attention on him, and we really feared he was going to end up in US custody in a very short period of time. When he disappeared in Hongkong, we thought that next time we’ll see him was on television, in the middle of a courtroom, handcuffed.

I know he’s very comfortable with the way I’ve been fulfilling my commitments to him, and that’s all I care about. I could have wrote one or two articles, I would have gained prizes and signed a book contract. It would have helped my career. But I decided to work with media from around the world, and I’ve been very clear about the fact I intend to publish these documents to the very last.

“Snowden is somebody who

I consider very heroic.

I care about what happens to him.”

Do you see Snowden as a source, or is he more than that ?

He is a source, obviously, but he’s somebody who I consider very heroic, who I admire greatly. Along with Laura, we went through a life-changing experience, and so I feel bonded to him as a human being, I care about what happens to him. I’m not gonna lie and say I only see him as a source. There are legal implications to put labels like friendship, but we have a relationship which is important to me, based on admiration.

Glenn Greewald. © Ludovic Carème for Télérama



You’ve been a lawyer, a blogger… Do you consider yourself a journalist now ?

Of course ! For me, journalism is holding the most powerful people accountable by informing the public what they’re doing in the dark, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. As a former lawyer, I think journalism and law have a lot of similarities. Still, some media call me a blogger. It’s so 2005.

I could understand this argument at the time, but now, all the journalists have blogs, and I’ve been working for one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the world (The Guardian). How can I be a blogger and they’re not ? It’s an empty term designed to discredit and remove people from the professional.

Did you feel suspicion or jealousy from fellow journalists ?

Journalists look at my scoops like a currency, so I became more important in their world. But I didn’t gain new friends. Journalists in Washington D.C. are total cowards. They sit there and say how dangerous leaks are.

Bob Woodward became one of the richest – if not the richest – journalists in the world by selling books containing all sorts of classified information. But nobody would have something to say about it because his sources are high level government officials and they’re protecting US interests. So they don’t actually think leaks are bad, they just think leaks are bad when they undermine the US government.

Is it possible to be a good journalist in a traditional media ?

It’s possible, but you’re able to do it despite these institutions and not because of them. You have to fight them as much as anything else. The most significant example is James Rise. His best story, at least in the last decade, was his discovery that the Bush administration was spying on Americans without any warrant. And he won a Pulitzer Prize for that. But he actually discovered that fourteen months before it was actually published. He went to his editors, who called the White House, who vetoed it because it would harm national security. The New York Times agreed not to publish, Risen had to fight endlessly, and the only reason he got it published is because he signed a book contract. The New York Times didn’t want to be scooped by their own reporter so they finally published it. So if Risen was able to do adversarial journalism, it was against his own employer.

A lot of practices that these big american media corporations do, and require everybody do, are actually quite new, like the idea you can’t express any opinion about the things you’re reporting on, or the one that some information should be withheld. They’re trying to pretend it’s intrinsic to the idea of journalism and yet, this a very recent development. The most impressive and significant journalism throughout american history was done by journalists who were very aggressive about what opinions they believed.

You wrote that “journalism is a form of activism”. Do you mean the myth of objectivity is synonymous with bad journalism ?

It’s dishonest to pretend to your readers there’s this kind of above-it-all, mathematically, balanced, almost inhuman machine that is there to tell the truth without any subjective assumption entering the calculus. It’s just so pompous to see yourself that way. If you look at every choice you make journalistically, who you’re quoting, who’s getting at the top and who’s buried at the bottom, what stories are worth reporting, who you choose to believe, etc., these are all so engrained in all sorts of subjective opinions about the world. To pretend otherwise is so delusional and deceitful to your readers that it makes journalism much more difficult to assess.

“I think that there are

some things a government

shouldn’t be able to do.”

What are your political views ?

Everyday I’m being accused of being a socialist and a libertarian, but a lot of people think I’m a right wing figure. Bill Keller, the former New York Times editor in chief, simultaneously compared me to Lenin and the Tea Party ! I do have strong opinions on what I report on. I think that there are some things a government shouldn’t be able to do, like putting people into prison without charges and access to a lawyer.

I think the US has become an insanely militaristic nation that uses violence and violation of international law as primary means of achieving their goals in the world. I just don’t accept any label because it would be an easy way to dismiss what I do and what I say : “He’s a republican, therefore…”, “He’s a democrat, therefore…” I’ve received support from members of Congress across the board, from both parties, privately and publically.

On the other hand, some american politicians are calling you a traitor for what you revealed and the way you did it…

That’s just the standard tactics governments uses – not only the american one. If you undermine the interest of people on power, that means you’re harming your own country and therefore a traitor. In the US political culture, it’s expected that the government want to criminalize or demonize journalists, but what’s amazing is that the government isn’t taking the lead on that. It’s people who call themselves journalists (or pundits). That’s an extraordinary propagandist victory for a government to get to train their journalists to attack people who bring transparency to the world.

Is it because you don’t trust media institutions you decided to quit The Guardian and to launch this new project with eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar, who put 250 million dollars in it ?

You need your own institution to fight back. There are different ways to do that : you can band together as independent journalists, you don’t have to build a formal institution, but it requires money and resources, legal support, etc. You need a team of like-minded people who are ready to do that kind of journalism in a sustained way.

Early on in the process, before I published the first story, when I was in Hongkong, I strongly considered leaving The Guardian. I was actually worried that if the British government prosecuted The Guardian, that could interfere with the journalistic process. Not because the editors would be fearful, but simply because their time and resources would be consumed by defending themselves from these oppressive measures [on december 4th, questioned by members of the Parliament, Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief for the british daily, declared he “will not be intimidated”, editor's note].

Under those circumstances, we were thinking about creating our own organization, with people supportive of our work : benevolent fact-checkers, lawyers who would work pro bono, etc. We were looking for funders at the time Omidyar called me on the phone, at the end of september. He laid out his visions of how he wanted his project to be, and I told him : “I feel like you stole my idea”. After this first phone call, we were already contacting people and starting to build the team.

We already hired a dozen people, three of them working here in Rio with me. We’re not looking only for investigative journalists, but we’re certainly looking for ethos. We don’t have any release date, but it’s gonna be relatively soon, and we’ll cover economics, climate, as well as corruption in DC or sports, not just national security and civil liberties. It’s funny : Pierre and I spent hours and hours on the phone, but we’ve never been in the same room.