The journalists who first revealed the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities dedicated a prestigious award on Friday to their source, Edward Snowden.

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras had earlier cleared immigration at John F Kennedy airport in New York without a hitch as they arrived to share a George Polk Award for national security reporting with Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. The Polk awards are administered by Long Island University.

"This award is really for Edward Snowden," said Poitras, who first met the former NSA analyst in Hong Kong with Greenwald and MacAskill last year, as she accepted the award in the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

“Each one of these awards provides perfect vindication, that what he [Snowden] did, coming forward, was absolutely the right thing to do and merits gratitude and not indictments and decades of imprisonment,” Greenwald said in his acceptance speech.

MacAskill thanked Snowden for his courage and expressed a hope that he would be able to travel freely to the US.



Greenwald and Poitras arrived in the US on Friday for the first time since reporting the NSA story. They travelled from Berlin, where Poitras lives, on Friday morning; Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, who was last year detained for nine hours as he passed through Heathrow airport in London, arrived on Thursday morning.

Investigative reporter Laura Poitras accepts the George Polk Award alongside Barton Gellman, far left, and Ewen MacAskill. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Federal prosecutors have charged Snowden, who leaked thousands of classified documents to the reporters, with violating the Espionage Act. Greenwald said he and Poitras had been seeking information from the US government about whether they were also the subject of an indictment that was under seal.

"They wanted us to have that kind of uncertainty about whether or not they would take action upon our return to the US," Greenwald said, at a press conference following the awards ceremony. "It's easy to say it doesn't seem like that would happen, but when those threats are directed at you, you take them seriously."

He said he and Poitras did not know how long they would stay in the US. "We haven't been doing a lot of long-term thinking because we didn't know what was going to happen upon de-planing," Greenwald said.

Greenwald, a US citizen, lives in Rio de Janeiro with Miranda, who had been carrying heavily encrypted documents from Berlin to Rio when he was detained by UK authorities.

Poitras said she had been stopped at the US border "close to 40 or more times" over the past six years because of reporting unrelated to the Snowden documents, but had had no problem on Friday.

"This time there are a lot more people paying attention and I don't think that means we shouldn't be concerned," she said.

In his acceptance speech, MacAskill noted that the Guardian’s national-security reporting had faced greater threats in the UK than in the US.

The UK touts its history of a free press and claims to support free speech, he said, "Yet when a story like Snowden comes along, you realise how superficial it all is.”