Glenn Greenwald | Books, Education, The Intercept, & Snowden (2024)

Glenn Greenwald (born March 6, 1967, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American journalist, author, and lawyer who throughout 2013 published news stories based on a trove of documents obtained by intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden. This reporting revealed large-scale covert information gathering by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies. Greenwald’s interviews with Snowden and subsequent writings earned him the 2013 George Polk Award for National Security Reporting and helped secure the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for The Guardian and The Washington Post. Following the Snowden revelations, Greenwald cofounded The Intercept, a reporting outlet dedicated to exposing government and corporate malfeasance through working with whistleblowers, and continued to operate as an independent and politically idiosyncratic pundit in American politics.

Greenwald was born to Daniel and Arlene Greenwald, and he was raised in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. Greenwald, inspired by his grandfather’s participation in local government, became interested in politics early, and he launched his own campaigns for city council in 1985 and 1991. He was unsuccessful on both occasions. In 1990 Greenwald received a B.A. from George Washington University and in 1995 received a J.D. from New York University. He went on to cofound his own firm specializing in constitutional law, taking a keen interest in defending civil liberties, including the free speech rights of neo-Nazis in several high-profile cases. In 2005 Greenwald wound down his law practice and began pursuing political journalism.

Greenwald was critical of the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and the war on terrorism, and he explored the topics of surveillance and civil liberties on his blog, Unclaimed Territory. Greenwald was hired by Salon in 2007, where he covered the media and politics. A 2012 article he wrote on filmmaker Laura Poitras’s alleged persecution by the U.S. government brought him to the attention of Edward Snowden, who was looking for journalists he could trust to publish the classified documents he had collected as a subcontractor for the NSA. Snowden contacted Greenwald in December 2012, shortly after the latter had been hired at The Guardian in July.

In May 2013 Snowden asked Greenwald and Poitras to meet him in Hong Kong, where they recorded a week of interviews, which, along with the documents provided by Snowden, formed the basis for Greenwald’s reporting and Poitras’s documentary CitizenFour. Snowden’s documents revealed that, among other things, the NSA had: collected the phone records of tens of millions of Americans; collaborated with the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s NSA equivalent, to covertly collect data from the Internet activity of non-Americans through the PRISM program; collaborated with the GCHQ to crack Internet users’ encryption software; and monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders.

Following the Snowden series, Greenwald secured funding from PayPal cofounder Pierre Omidyar to launch the news outlet The Intercept in 2014. Under the leadership of founding editors Greenwald, Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, the organization broke several major stories and worked with government whistleblowers, including Daniel Hale and Reality Winner. In 2015, on the basis of leaks provided by Hale, The Intercept published “The Drone Papers,” an exposé of the U.S. drone war program in the Middle East and Africa, revealing a previously unknown scale of casualties and potentially illegal actions. Winner’s leaks suggested evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but her arrest hours after publication of The Intercept’s article prompted criticism of the outlet’s protection of sources.

In 2016 Greenwald helped launch The Intercept’s Brazilian branch, The Intercept Brasil, edited by a Brazilian team in Portuguese. In 2019 Greenwald was honoured with the Vladimir Herzog Special Award for groundbreaking reporting on “Operação Lava Jato” or Operation Car Wash, the prosecution of various members of the Brazil’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) for alleged corruption. Greenwald published leaked messages that he alleged revealed collusion between prosecutors and the judiciary.

Greenwald, who has historically eschewed political labels, has been called a libertarian by others. Following accusations of collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Greenwald became increasingly critical of the Democratic Party establishment. He argued that the accusations were largely unsupported by evidence and that the allegation of Russian interference, even if true, would in itself be inconsequential given the United States’ own history of interference in foreign elections. This strain of whataboutism became more pronounced as Greenwald’s editorial voice evolved from that of a contrarian gadfly to an overt apologist for Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. Greenwald left The Intercept in October 2020, citing attempted censorship of a story he had written on alleged corruption by Hunter Biden, the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Editors at The Intercept countered that Greenwald had not been censored but had failed to substantiate his claims about Joe and Hunter Biden to editorial standards.

After his departure from The Intercept, Greenwald became more closely aligned with the MAGA movement’s media ecosystem, and he was a regular guest on Fox News programs hosted by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. After Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Greenwald routinely echoed Kremlin talking points on Twitter and in his Fox News appearances. In December 2022 Greenwald launched a daily live broadcast on Rumble.com, a video-hosting platform popular among conservative users, and in March 2023 Greenwald signed a contract to exclusively publish articles on Rumble’s affiliated platform, Locals.