Though he remains in exile in Russia, Edward Snowden still chats with Glenn Greenwald most days. Here, Snowden shares his thoughts on his partner. (You can read our Q+A with Greenwald here.)

Why Glenn?

Glenn is a rare kind of American writer. He had been passionately writing on constitutional issues, national security, and problematic interpretations of government authority for years, but what made him stand out was his complete independence from the "access journalism" problem. Journalists and editors who rely on a stream of authorized leaks worry about being blacklisted, so they suspend their critical faculties—by dropping damning context from stories, using euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" instead of "torture," and so on. Anyone who reads a Greenwald piece can see that he doesn’t allow those kinds of political edits, and that’s precisely the kind of commitment to truth that I knew these stories would require.

What is it like to work with Glenn day to day—his ethic and manner?

He’s a litigator by training, and that’s clear in his interviewing method. He digs, he presses, and he provokes on almost every point, looking for inconsistencies and loose threads. He’s inexhaustible, which can make it hard to keep up, but he’s passionate about his work, and his practically pathological commitment to holding powerful figures to account is exactly what American journalism desperately needs. In Hong Kong, Glenn was so consumed by work he was unable to sleep. I don’t think I saw him stay down for more than two hours a night, but it made sense, because he was working under extraordinary pressure.

Do you think that the adversarial stance of journalists like Glenn is the most powerful way of confronting the NSA?

At the end of the day, the work of reporters like Glenn reminds governments—and the global population more broadly—that we live in a multipolar world, where civil power is growing at the expense of institutional authorities. Governments that don’t legitimize their authority with the public will increasingly see that authority eroded by a decentralized, global community creating its own technical solutions to policy abuses. Clever applications of technology are increasingly serving as a new kind of Supreme Court, where bad policies in Uganda can be overturned by a bit of good engineering in Europe. For example, when the Turkish government said, "We’re blocking online protest speech," the Internet said, "Overruled."