The Man Who Knows Too Much -- Michael Paterniti, GQ
Glenn Greenwald is trying to lose fifteen pounds. "Um, it's been a little crazy these past nine months," he says. "And I will eat French fries or potato chips if they're in front of me." On his porch, perched on a jungle mountaintop in Rio, the morning is fresh. Greenwald, in board shorts and a collared short-sleeve shirt, has done his daily hour's worth of yoga and attached himself to one of his five laptops as his dozen dogs yap and wag to begin the day's circus in his monkey-and-macaw paradise.
To put it simply, Greenwald has had one hell of a dizzying run. The Bourne plotline is familiar now: In late 2012, a shady contact calling himself Cincinnatus reached out via e-mail with the urgent desire to reveal some top-secret documents. As a blogger, author, and relentless commentator on all things related to the NSA, Greenwald had been here before. He figured it was a setup, or nut job, and disregarded the message. The source then contacted Greenwald's friend Laura Poitras, an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, and sent along a sample of encrypted documents. Poitras got in touch with Greenwald immediately: Not only did this seem like a potential jackpot, she said, but Cincinnatus wouldn't go ahead until Greenwald had been looped in.
Soon, per the source's instructions, they were on a plane to Hong Kong. Greenwald and Poitras did exactly as they were told, showing up at the Mira hotel at 10:20 a.m. on June 3, in front of a giant plastic alligator, looking for a man holding a Rubik's Cube. "I thought he would be a 60-year-old senior NSA guy," says Greenwald. And then here's this pale, stringbeany kid with glasses, "looking all of twentysomething." This, of course, was the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Once they retired to his hotel room, he turned over an estimated tens of thousands of documents, the vast majority of them classified "Top Secret," comprising arguably the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history. After days of intensive work with Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden fled—just minutes ahead of the press—only to reappear in Moscow.
This left Greenwald with the most exhilarating and daunting task of his career: to figure out how to curate and publish the vast Snowden archive in his Brazilian self-exile. Once he began, his work triggered an avalanche of articles that branded him a hero, a traitor, a collaborator. In one fell swoop, he had piqued and scandalized and provoked the world into a deeper debate about not just surveillance and privacy but power and truth. The odyssey eventually led him from The Guardian, where the first articles appeared revealing the NSA's secret surveillance of Verizon records, to his central position in Pierre Omidyar's $250 million muckraking gambit known as First Look Media and The Intercept, where Greenwald is figurehead, main attraction, and blogitor-in-chief.
Just a week before returning to the U.S. for the first time since last June to accept the Polk Award with Poitras (he also shared this year's Pulitzer Prize for Public Service)—and with a new book slated to be released in mid-May entitled No Place to Hide—Greenwald took time out of his relentless schedule over three days in April to talk with GQ. In person, Greenwald, 47, is both more affable and happier than he comes across in television interviews, where in shirt and tie he appears as the ever sober-and-serious collegiate debater, ready to blow up his opponents, which he frequently does with drone-like precision. Rather than imbuing his contradictory arguments with that rumpled, hungover Hitchensian grandeur, Greenwald is an aggressive battering ram—offering breathless, unapologetic, attorney-like deconstructions of the issues at hand, while calling out everyone from The New York Times to Hillary Clinton.
What was your first impression of Snowden?
I first started talking to Snowden, sitting right at this table, by chat on the computer. People e-mail you and say, "Oh, I have a huge story," and you read it and it's like, this is the ranting of a crazy person. So once I was encrypted, which took a while, I just kept insisting that he send me some sampling of what he had. So he sent me two dozen extraordinary documents. And I remember, I mean, I literally just physiologically couldn't breathe. As I was reading them, I had to keep stopping and running around the house and telling [my partner] David what I had. I was half celebrating but half freaking out, because I started, for the first time, to realize the potential of what this was.
I first started talking to Snowden, sitting right at this table, by chat on the computer. People e-mail you and say, "Oh, I have a huge story," and you read it and it's like, this is the ranting of a crazy person. So once I was encrypted, which took a while, I just kept insisting that he send me some sampling of what he had. So he sent me two dozen extraordinary documents. And I remember, I mean, I literally just physiologically couldn't breathe. As I was reading them, I had to keep stopping and running around the house and telling [my partner] David what I had. I was half celebrating but half freaking out, because I started, for the first time, to realize the potential of what this was.
Even when we got to Hong Kong, I did have a big fear that this was all going to be bullshit. Why would you assume that it's going to actually all work out exactly the way you hoped it would? It never does, right? So even though I'd seen the documents that Laura had, I still was concerned about who this guy was. When we first met him at the hotel, it was just more confusion—definitely like there's something really wrong, really strange here. This is not what I was expecting at all. Why would a person this age have access to this kind of information?
What were those moments like when you went back up to his room?
Laura just started filming, because that's what Laura does. We're sitting in a small room, and we just tried to have some pleasantries, like, "How was the trip?" And it just... Everyone was so tense. So the only thing to do was to dive right in to the substance. And that was absolutely my tactic. I was just going to pound the shit out of him with the hardest questions I could. Not let him take a break, because I needed to know that he wasn't someone impetuously throwing his life away. I wanted to know why he was willing to risk his whole life for this political ideal. How Snowden was perceived [by the public] was going to matter a lot for the story. So I was able to really interrogate him for like five or six hours, until I realized, no, actually he is a very independent thinker and extremely knowledgeable, and I got his whole biography.
Laura just started filming, because that's what Laura does. We're sitting in a small room, and we just tried to have some pleasantries, like, "How was the trip?" And it just... Everyone was so tense. So the only thing to do was to dive right in to the substance. And that was absolutely my tactic. I was just going to pound the shit out of him with the hardest questions I could. Not let him take a break, because I needed to know that he wasn't someone impetuously throwing his life away. I wanted to know why he was willing to risk his whole life for this political ideal. How Snowden was perceived [by the public] was going to matter a lot for the story. So I was able to really interrogate him for like five or six hours, until I realized, no, actually he is a very independent thinker and extremely knowledgeable, and I got his whole biography.
He said his parents were Republicans, that he enlisted in the military and got injured in a training accident. He doesn't come across as unstable or completely alienated and weird. He's not acting out of anger at the world for rejecting him. There's a normalcy to him, an unassuming humility that people can relate to, or at least not feel threatened by.
You mention in your book that Snowden's moral universe was first informed by video games.
In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right? Like some person who's been kidnapped and you've got to rescue them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you've got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it's all about figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them in pursuit of some public good. Even if it's really risky or dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual.
In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right? Like some person who's been kidnapped and you've got to rescue them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you've got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it's all about figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them in pursuit of some public good. Even if it's really risky or dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual.
Did you like him from the start?
After the initial awkwardness, I was surprised by how much I liked him. I didn't expect that. I didn't know that we were going to be so compatible and friendly and this bond was going to develop. I mean, yeah, he's funny. He has a very dry sense of humor. Even now, every time one of us says something a little bit risqué, even just joking, it's always like, "That's definitely going into your indictment." In Hong Kong, we would say, "I get the top bunk at Gitmo."
After the initial awkwardness, I was surprised by how much I liked him. I didn't expect that. I didn't know that we were going to be so compatible and friendly and this bond was going to develop. I mean, yeah, he's funny. He has a very dry sense of humor. Even now, every time one of us says something a little bit risqué, even just joking, it's always like, "That's definitely going into your indictment." In Hong Kong, we would say, "I get the top bunk at Gitmo."
What has been your philosophy with the archive?
I knew from the start that I was going to be super-aggressive with how it got reported. If I had a document about Norway or Brazil, I was going to try to team with a journalist in those places. I knew that I wasn't going to abide by the normal rules that the U.S. government has told media outlets they have to abide by if they want to do this stuff without being prosecuted. I knew I was going to cross those lines, because I don't believe in those lines.
I knew from the start that I was going to be super-aggressive with how it got reported. If I had a document about Norway or Brazil, I was going to try to team with a journalist in those places. I knew that I wasn't going to abide by the normal rules that the U.S. government has told media outlets they have to abide by if they want to do this stuff without being prosecuted. I knew I was going to cross those lines, because I don't believe in those lines.
