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Actor

1967-03-06 · New York City, New York, USA · Female

8 series in the catalog

Glenn Edward Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer.

In 1996, Greenwald founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He began blogging on national security issues in October 2005, when he became increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and has maintained a critical position on American foreign policy.

Greenwald started contributing to Salon in 2007, and to The Guardian in 2012. In June 2013, while at The Guardian, he began publishing a series of reports detailing previously unknown information about American and British global surveillance programs based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden. His work contributed to The Guardian's 2014 Pulitzer Prize win and he was among a group of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award. In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept, of which he was an editor until he resigned in October 2020. Greenwald subsequently started publishing his own newsletter.

Through The Intercept Brasil in June 2019, Greenwald published leaked conversations between senior officials involved in Operation Car Wash, a corruption case in Brazil. The conversations appeared to show the investigative judge acting prejudicially against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the lead up to the 2018 elections. Greenwald was charged with cybercrimes by Brazilian prosecutors over the leaks in January 2020, though the charges were dismissed by a federal judge a month later. He now hosts the show System Update on Rumble.

Early life and education

Greenwald was born in Queens, New York City, to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald. Greenwald's family moved to Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, when he was an infant; his parents separated when he was six. Greenwald is Jewish, but grew up without practicing an organized religion, did not have a bar mitzvah, and has said his "moral precepts aren't informed in any way by religious doctrine". Greenwald attended Nova Middle School and Nova High School in Davie, Florida.

Inspired by his grandfather's time on the then-Lauderdale Lakes City Council, Greenwald, still in high school, decided to run at the age of 17 for an at-large seat on the council in the 1985 elections. He was unsuccessful, coming in fourth place with 7% of the total vote. In 1991, Greenwald ran again, coming in third place with 18% of the vote. After that, he stopped running for political office and instead focused on law school.

He received a B.A. in philosophy from George Washington University in 1990 and a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1994. His experiences on his college debate team influenced his career path. "That developed, I think, a lot of the skills and interest that ended up guiding my future career," he said in an interview.

Litigation attorney

Greenwald practiced law in the litigation department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz from 1994 to 1995. In 1996, he co-founded his own litigation firm, Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights. He worked pro bono much of the time, and his cases included representing white supremacist Matthew Hale in Illinois, who, Greenwald believed, was wrongly imprisoned, and the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

About his work in First Amendment speech cases, Greenwald told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy... not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".

Later, according to Greenwald, "I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing."

Unclaimed Territory and Salon

In October 2005, he began his blog Unclaimed Territory, focusing on the investigation pertaining to the Plame affair, the CIA leak grand jury investigation, the federal indictment of Scooter Libby, and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. In April 2006, the blog received the 2005 Koufax Award for "Best New Blog". According to Sean Wilentz in the New Statesman, Greenwald "seemed to take pride in attacking Republicans and Democrats alike".

In February 2007, Greenwald became a contributing writer for the Salon website, and the new column and blog superseded Unclaimed Territory, although Salon featured hyperlinks to it in Greenwald's dedicated biographical section.

Among the frequent topics of his Salon articles were the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the candidacy of former CIA official John O. Brennan for the jobs of either Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA) or the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after the election of Barack Obama. Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for the post after opposition centered in liberal blogs and led by Greenwald.

In a 2010 article for Salon, Greenwald described U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning as "a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives" and "a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg". In an article for The Raw Story published in 2011, Greenwald criticized the prison conditions in which Manning was held after her arrest by military authorities.

Greenwald was described by Rachel Maddow during his period writing for Salon as "the American left's most fearless political commentator."

The Guardian

In July 2012, Greenwald joined the American wing of the British newspaper The Guardian, contributing a weekly column and a daily blog. Greenwald wrote on Salon that the move offered him "the opportunity to reach a new audience, to further internationalize my readership, and to be re-invigorated by a different environment" as reasons for the move.

Global surveillance disclosure

Greenwald was initially contacted anonymously in late 2012 by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency, who said he held "sensitive documents" that he wished to share. Greenwald found the measures that Snowden asked him to take to secure their communications too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras about a month later in January 2013.

According to The Guardian, Snowden was attracted to Greenwald and Poitras by a Salon article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras' films had made her a "target of the government". Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February or in April, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them both.

As part of the global surveillance disclosure, the first of Snowden's documents were published on June 5, 2013, in The Guardian in an article by Greenwald reporting on the top-secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with telephone metadata for all calls between the U.S. and abroad, as well as all domestic calls. Greenwald said that Snowden's documents exposed the "scale of domestic surveillance under Obama". In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017, after the publication of the Vault 7 files, "top intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Glenn Greenwald as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against him, "potentially paving the way" for his prosecution. However, the White House rejected this idea. "I am not the least bit surprised," Greenwald told Yahoo! News, "that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts…