Will there be many more Snowdens to come, based on Greenwald’s “model”? Perhaps. But it’s more likely that Greenwald Inc. has already peaked. The NSA, duly chastened by Snowden’s leaks, is changing under presidential directives that will rein in its mass collection of telephone “metadata”—its most controversial program—while most of the rest of us have moved on. “I think there’s a bit of Snowden fatigue out there right now,” said former NSA director Michael Hayden, who points to the public’s less-than-inflamed response to Greenwald’s recent revelation that the NSA under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) monitored five prominent Muslim-Americans whose names appeared among 7,485 email addresses examined between 2002 and 2008. Greenwald “thought that FISA thing was going to be a grand finale for the fireworks display, but frankly it didn’t bounce very much,” said Hayden.

Snowden’s personal stock appears to be in decline as well. At the end of July Rick Ledgett, the same NSA official who late last year floated the idea of amnesty for Snowden in exchange for the documents he hadn’t yet disclosed, told the Aspen Security Forum that the calculus had since changed. The secrets that the NSA leaker escaped with have grown somewhat outdated. “As time goes on, the utility for us of having that conversation becomes less,” Ledgett said.

Another issue that tends to deflate the prospects for Greenwald, Inc., perhaps, is that no one (least of all Greenwald) can point to any serious violation of civil liberties or prosecution based on the Snowden disclosures – except, arguably, that which threatens Snowden himself. No person has been charged; there are no Kafkaesque Joseph Ks being mysteriously placed on trial as a result of NSA surveillance; no one else has come forward complaining that family members or neighbors are being “disappeared.” It’s hard, in other words, to keep people rallying around what remains an abstract potential threat. (Greenwald retorts that the five Muslim-Americans he wrote about have been “harassed by the government in different ways,” even though they were “never charged with any wrongdoing.”)

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the international environment has changed dramatically for the worse since the first Snowden revelations. The horrifying rise of what may be al Qaeda’s even more barbaric successor, the Islamic State, along with new threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin and others, has reoriented discussion back toward the perils that the NSA programs were intended to thwart in the first place.

In late July Omidyar announced on his blog that he was no longer as intent on creating a “big flagship website” for First Look Media, saying, “We have definitely rethought some of our original ideas and plans.” The founder said that instead he wanted to “test more ideas” for reaching a “mass audience.” Asked whether the new company was wavering or uncertain of its mission, Greenwald said that Omidyar is “more committed than ever to building the Intercept … People instinctively look for evidence of ‘wavering’ with new enterprises — it’s the human desire to see others fail — but anyone looking for that here is going to be sorely disappointed.”

Greenwald also denies deliberately dribbling out information to promote himself or his book, saying the sporadic nature of the Snowden disclosures has a lot more to do with the time it takes to understand them. “One of things I don’t think is quite appreciated by some people is that the archive we were given is vast in size,” he said. “The documents are extremely complicated. Many of them take multiple times to read before you can understand what they are.” (He added that there is no conflict of interest in the Omidyar fund’s legal support of his domestic partner, saying he merely asked Omidyar to take up the funding of the lawsuit when his former employer, the Guardian, said it could no longer pay the legal fees after Greenwald left the newspaper.)

Greenwald, however, admits that he’s ready to move onto other stories besides the NSA.

Snowden, of course, won’t be able to do that—perhaps ever. He may spend the rest of his life as a Russian exile (his visa was extended at the end of July, and given Putin’s current animus toward Washington over Ukraine, it wouldn’t be surprising if it were renewed again). Still, Greenwald says, he finds that Snowden is considered a hero wherever he goes (outside of the United States), and both of them only want to give the public what it deserves to know. “I would say of all the facts that have driven this episode over the last year, the most under-appreciated one is this: what a conservative whistleblower Edward Snowden is,” says Greenwald. “The reason for that is because he was so adamant about what his goal was: not to unilaterally destroy the NSA or the programs he revealed but to let Americans meaningfully debate them. That’s why he feels so vindicated. … I probably would have been more aggressive if I’d had a different source.”