Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer turned muckraker who’s got Washington on edge with his cyberspying revelations, regularly works the intersection between civil liberties and national security.
Writing for Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper, Greenwald has cast fresh light on how the National Security Agency (NSA), under President Barack Obama, has pursued electronic surveillance on a grand scale.
“The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits,” he wrote Friday in an opinion piece on the Guardian’s website (www.guardian.co.uk).
“And that’s what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark.”
New York-born and Florida-raised, Greenwald, 46, specialized in litigating constitutional and civil rights cases before shifting in 2005 towards blogging, book-writing and what he calls “adversarial journalism.”
In four best-selling books, most recently “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful,” he has sought to expose threats to freedom of information.
His ongoing concern stems in part from the USA PATRIOT Act, adopted in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, which gave the US government sweeping new powers of surveillance, ostensibly to combat Al-Qaeda.
Enacted by the George W. Bush administration, the law’s title is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.
“There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they’ve done we’re all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner,” Greenwald wrote Friday.
He likens the present-day situation to the Watergate years of Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign as president in August 1974 after revelations of his Republican Party’s “dirty tricks” during his re-election campaign.
Not surprisingly, Greenwald is a staunch supporter of Bradley Manning, the US army private who is currently on trial for turning thousands of confidential US government documents over to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Greenwald, who claims to be “borderline illiterate” on IT matters, entered journalism through his own blog, Unclaimed Territory. He later wrote for Salon.com before contributing to The Guardian in August 2012.
“I approach my journalism as a litigator,” he told The New York Times this week. “People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove it.”
Greenwald spends much of his time in Brazil, where he lives with a Brazilian partner who cannot join him permanently in America because of the US government’s refusal to recognize same-sex relationships.
“I do think political posture is driven by your personality, your relationship with authority, how comfortable are you in your life,” he told The New York Times.
“When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to evaluate: ?Is it me, or is the system bad?'”
US muckraker works junction between security, freedoms
