????Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed Monday that he will release documents that will shame the British authority after his partner David Miranda was detained.
????THE journalist who first published secrets leaked by fugitive former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden vowed Monday to publish more documents and said Britain will be “sorry” for detaining his partner for nine hours. ????British authorities used anti-terrorism laws Aug.15 to detain David Miranda, partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, as he passed through London’s Heathrow airport. ????Miranda, 28, a Brazilian citizen, said he was questioned for nine hours before being released without charge, minus his laptop, cell phone and memory sticks, which were seized. ????Greenwald, a columnist for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper who is based in Rio de Janeiro, said the detention was an attempt to intimidate him for publishing documents leaked by Snowden disclosing U.S. surveillance of global Internet communications. ????Snowden gave Greenwald between 15,000 to 20,000 documents with details of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. ????“I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did,” Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio’s airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil. ????“They wanted to intimidate our journalism, to show that they have power and will not remain passive but will attack us more intensely if we continue publishing their secrets,” he said. ????Miranda told reporters that six British agents questioned him continuously about all aspects of his life during his detention in a room at Heathrow airport. He said he was freed and returned his passport only when he started shouting in the airport lounge. ????Before Greenwald was the journalist who broke and defended the most important story of 2013, he was many other things: an underage South Florida politician, a lawyer at a high-powered corporate firm and even the legal arm of his business partner’s gay porn distribution company. ????Greenwald is a man of superficial contradictions: Brazil’s best-known American blogger, and a high-profile beneficiary of U.S. Supreme Court ruling that will allow binational couples to live legally in the United States. ????But at this moment, Glenn Greenwald is, first of all, a major supporting player in this century’s definitive spy thriller. The 29-year-old government contractor finds proof of invasive NSA spying programs. The contractor abandons a comfortable life in Hawaii to expose them, fleeing to Hong Kong and teaming up with reporters he believes he can trust, including Greenwald. ????For Greenwald, The Guardian’s Snowden-sourced series is career-defining. It also represents a rare and pure vindication for a figure long viewed even by many on the left as a difficult eccentric. There may be an emerging consensus on the out-of-control government power and secrecy. Greenwald was always there. And people who have known Greenwald for years say his defining characteristic may be that he has never changed. ????“If Glenn feels he’s right about something, he doesn’t care if the entire world hates him,” said David Elbaum, who worked for Greenwald’s law firm a decade ago. ????Before he helped Snowden publish the Obama administration’s surveillance skeletons, Greenwald was a determined young lawyer. His career began in 1994 at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, known as perhaps the most lucrative and hardest-charging in New York’s brutal corporate legal world. ????Greenwald has been a careful observer of politics since his childhood in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, where he watched his grandfather serve as a city councilman. In high school, he joined the debate team, and during his senior year, at 17, he decided to run for city council. ????Greenwald learned — after two unsuccessful campaigns before the age of 25 — he wasn’t cut out for politics. ????“My grandfather would try to represent poor homeowners against the powers that be in the city. He taught me that whatever skills you have should be devoted toward undermining the people who are the strongest and most powerful,” Greenwald said. ????At age 28, he left Wachtell Lipton to start his own firm. ????Greenwald spent roughly five years defending the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis, including Matthew Hale, the “Pontifex Maximus” of the Illinois church formerly known as the World Church of the Creator, one of whose disciples went on a murderous spree in 1999. ????Personal lawsuits aside, by 2000, Greenwald was practicing full-time with his name on the door of his own three-man firm. ????Greenwald said he called on his experience as a litigator when he first spoke to Snowden. ????“When I got to Hong Kong, my immediate priority was to kick the tires as hard as I could on his story and see if there was anything that he was hiding,” Greenwald said. “I spent five or six hours just relentlessly questioning him, using the same tricks that I used to use in depositions.” ????But despite his skill and ease as a litigator — or maybe because of his skill and ease — Greenwald grew bored with it. In 2002, he started a consulting company, Master Notions LLC, with his best friend, a Los Angeles film producer named Jason Buchtel. Greenwald mostly handled legal matters and contracts. ????“I had no interest in business. I was just looking around for what I was going to do next,” Greenwald said. ????He assisted on the production of a movie, “Showboy,” a 2002 mockumentary about a fired “Six Feet Under” writer, and once consulted on a company’s development of “some doll that was supposed to comfort people who had anxiety issues.” ????On the second day of his vacation in Brazil, he met Miranda, then 19, on the beach. ????“We instantly fell in love. We just knew from the moment that we met. We had this really intense bond. Once that happened, I knew he couldn’t come and live in the U.S. with me, so my only choice was to stay in Rio. That kind of forced me to give up my law practice and figure out what came next.” ????Greenwald still lives in Brazil, in Rio’s Gavea neighborhood, on a permanent visa with Miranda and their 10 rescued dogs. On June 26, the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, and that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages that are already considered legal by states. This changes things for the couple. ????For now, Greenwald’s professional work requires more attention than this major development in their personal life. The NSA series is still going after beginning in early June. When they met, Snowden supplied Greenwald with a “volume of documents so great that I haven’t actually gone through them all.” Stories based on the leaked documents will continue for another few months, Greenwald said. ????“I get bored with myself,” he said. “If I’m still working on these stories a year from now, I’ll probably be in an asylum somewhere.”(SD-Agencies) | 