Snoop Snoop Song: A Conversation with Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald on the importance of privacy, the hypocrisy of Democrats, and how he almost lost the NSA leak
By Alex Mierjeski at Harper's Magazine
In 2005, Glenn Greenwald began blogging about politics and national security to complement his day job as a constitutional and civil-rights lawyer in New York. Two years later, his blog Unclaimed Territory was picked up by Salon. In early June of this year, Greenwald began breaking for the Guardian newspaper a landmark series of stories culled from top-secret National Security Agency documents obtained through his relationship with whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald’s facilitation of the NSA leaks has placed him close enough to the epicenter of a divisive political debate about privacy and security that he has himself become integral to the discourse. I spoke to him about his experience over the phone from his home in Rio de Janeiro.
Editor’s note: the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Did Edward Snowden reach out to you directly, out of the blue?
He emailed me back in December of last year, anonymously, and said something along the lines of “I and a few other people have some things that you’d be interested in. The problem is we can only communicate with you by encrypted email, so do you have PGP encryption?” I answered him and said “I’ll do it in the next couple of days and then you can email me back.” And he emailed in a few days and said “Did you do it yet?” and I said, “No, I haven’t done it yet,” and then he sent me step-by-step instructions — encryption for idiots, basically.
At this point I still didn’t know who he was or what he had. I frequently get people saying, “I have a huge thing for you,” and the vast majority of the time it turns out to be bullshit. So I didn’t prioritize it, but after a couple of days he wrote me back, and I still hadn’t done it. Then he made me a step-by-step video that he posted on YouTube about how to install and use PGP encryption. But I still didn’t do it, and so then he got frustrated and went to Laura Poitras, who he knew I had worked with and was friends with, because she does have encryption, and he said, “I’m going to give this stuff to you and then get Glenn involved.”
So I almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history because I didn’t bother to install encryption.
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