Glenn Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American political journalist, lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author. He was a columnist for Guardian US from August 2012 to October 2013. He was a columnist for Salon.com from 2007 to 2012, and an occasional contributor to The Guardian. Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator. At Salon he contributed as a columnist and blogger, focusing on political and legal topics. He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest, and In These Times.
Greenwald was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. Three of the four books he authored have been New York Times bestsellers. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, UCLA School of Law, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Maryland. He frequently appears on various radio and television programs.
Greenwald has received awards including the first Izzy Award for independent journalism, in 2009, and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary. In June 2013 Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillance programmes, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. His NSA reporting has won numerous awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting, the 2013 Online Journalism Awards, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting in Brazil for his articles in O Globo on NSA mass surveillance of Brazilians (becoming the first foreigner to win the award), the 2013 Libertad de Expresion Internacional award from Argentinian magazine Perfil, and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the hometown of his partner, David Michael Miranda. Greenwald has said his residence in Brazil is the result of an American law, the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, which prevented his partner from receiving a visa to reside in the United States with him. The pertinent section of the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, in U.S. v. Windsor.Continue Reading »
