The house’s non-dog denizen is Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, aged 46, is one of the more prominent US political commentators of his generation. Well before the Snowden story made him a household name, Greenwald had built up a following. A litigator by profession, he spent a decade working in the federal and state court system. The son of Jewish parents, truculent, gay, radical and passionate about civil liberties, Greenwald found his voice in the Bush era. In 2005 he gave up his practice to concentrate on writing full time. His online blog attracted a wide readership. From 2007 he contributed to Salon.com as a columnist.
From his home in Rio, Greenwald frequently appears as a pundit on US TV networks. This means driving down the mountain in his red Kia (which smells of dog) to a studio in the city’s hippodrome. Security staff greet him warmly in Portuguese – he speaks it fluently. The studio has a camera, a chair and a desk. Seated at the desk, the camera depicts him in the uniform of a killer lawyer: clean shirt, smart jacket, tie. Under the table, and unseen by his audience in New York or Seattle, Greenwald will wear flip-flops and a pair of beach shorts.
This hybrid outfit bespeaks a wider duality, between private and professional. In his private life, Greenwald is soft-hearted. He is obviously a sucker for distressed beasts; he and his partner David Miranda have scooped up 10 strays. They also dog-sit other people’s and keep an additional cat. Greenwald and Miranda met when the journalist came to Rio for a two-month holiday in 2005; it was Greenwald’s second day in town, and he was lying on the beach. They quickly fell in love; Greenwald says he lives in Miranda’s Brazilian coastal home city because US federal law refused to recognise same-sex marriages. (It does now). Miranda works as Greenwald’s journalist-assistant. And when you meet him, Greenwald is mild, easy to get along with, chatty and kind.
Professionally, though, Greenwald is a different creature: adversarial, remorseless, sardonic and forensic. He is a relentless pricker of what he regards as official US hypocrisy. Greenwald has been a waspish critic of the George W Bush administration, and of Obama. He is scathing of Washington’s record. Citizens’ rights, drone strikes, foreign wars, the US’s disastrous engagement with the Muslim world, Guantanamo Bay, America’s ‘global torture regime’ – all have been subjects for Greenwald’s Swiftian pen. In long, sometimes torrential posts, he has chronicled the US government’s alleged crimes around the world. Greenwald’s outspoken views on privacy make him arguably America’s best-known critic of government surveillance.
Fans view him as a radical hero in the revolutionary tradition of Thomas Paine. Enemies regard him as an irritant, an ‘activist’, even a traitor. Two of his books cover the foreign policy and executive abuses of the Bush era. A third, With Liberty and Justice for Some (2011), examines the double standards in America’s criminal justice system. Greenwald argues persuasively that there is one rule for the powerless and another for those in high office who break the law, and invariably get away with it. The book delves into a theme important to both Greenwald and Snowden: the illegal wiretapping scandal in the Bush White House, and the fact that nobody was ever punished for it.
In August 2012, Greenwald left Salon.com and joined the Guardian as a freelance columnist. It was a nice fit. The paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, sees the Guardian as inhabiting an editorial space distinct from most American newspapers – with less reverence for the notions of professional demarcation and detachment that, rightly or wrongly, shape much US journalism. More than most media outlets, the Guardian has embraced new digital technologies that have radically disrupted the old order.
Rusbridger observes: ‘We have, I think, been more receptive to the argument that newspapers can give a better account of the world by bringing together the multiple voices – by no means all of them conventional journalists – who now publish on many different platforms and in a great variety of styles. That’s how Greenwald ended up on the Guardian.’
Greenwald thus personifies a debate over what it means to be a journalist in the 21st century, in a new and noisy world of digital self-publishing, teeming with bloggers, citizen reporters and Twitter. Some have called this digital ecosystem outside mainstream publishing ‘the Fifth Estate’, in contrast to the establishment Fourth. Hollywood even used the name for a movie about WikiLeaks.
However, Rusbridger adds: ‘Greenwald does not much like being described as a member of the Fifth Estate – largely because there’s a persistent attempt by people in politics and the law as well as journalism to limit protections (for example, over sources or secrets) to people they regard (but struggle to define) as bona fide journalists. But he recognisably does have a foot in both camps, old and new.’
For sure, Greenwald believes in a partisan approach to journalism – but one, he says, that is grounded in facts, evidence and verifiable data. Typically he uses detail to smite his opponents, prising corrections from temples of US fact-checking, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In an illuminating conversation with Bill Keller, a former editor of the New York Times, Greenwald acknowledges that ‘establishment media venues’ have done some ‘superb reporting’ in recent decades. But he argues that the default model in US journalism – that the reporter sets aside his subjective opinions in the interests of a higher truth – has led to some ‘atrocious journalism’ and toxic habits. These include too much deference to the US government of the day, and falsely equating a view that is true with one that isn’t, in the interests of ‘balance’.
The idea that journalists can have no opinions is ‘mythical’, Greenwald says. He reserves special contempt for one particular class: journalists who in his view act as White House stooges. He calls them sleazeballs. He asserts that instead of taking the powerful to task, the DC press corps frequently perform the role of courtier.
Keller, meanwhile, along with other thoughtful editors, have their own critique of ‘advocacy journalism’. Keller says: ‘The thing is, once you have publicly declared your “subjective assumptions and political values”, it’s human nature to want to defend them, and it becomes tempting to minimise facts, or frame the argument, in ways that support your declared viewpoint.’
In the months to come, Greenwald’s own brand of advocacy journalism was going to be subjected to more public scrutiny than he could ever have imagined.
In December 2012, one of Greenwald’s readers pinged him an email. The email didn’t stand out; he gets dozens of similar ones every day. The sender didn’t identify himself. He (or it could have been a she) wrote: ‘I have some stuff you might be interested in.’
‘He was very vague,’ Greenwald recalls.
This mystery correspondent had an unusual request: he asked Greenwald to install PGP encryption software on to his laptop. Once up and running, it allows two parties to carry out an encrypted online chat. If used correctly, PGP guarantees privacy (the initials stand for ‘Pretty Good Privacy’); it prevents a man-in-the-middle attack by a third party. The source didn’t explain why this curious measure was needed.
Greenwald had no objections – he had been meaning for some time to set up a tool widely employed by investigative journalists, by WikiLeaks and by others suspicious of government snooping. But there were two problems. ‘I’m basically technically illiterate,’ he admits. Greenwald also had a lingering sense that the kind of person who insisted on encryption might turn out to be slightly crazy.