Sounds like someone ran his background with a fine tooth comb…
Via NYDN:
The reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs has a little secret of his own.
Before he was a reporter and commentator for The Guardian newspaper, Glenn Greenwald was a lawyer — and had a part-time job in the porn business.
“It was a long time ago,” Greenwald told the Daily News.
In a column posted on the Guardian website Wednesday, he hinted at his checkered past.
“I’m 46 years old and, like most people, have lived a complicated and varied adult life. I didn’t manage my life from the age of 18 onward with the intention of being a family values U.S. senator. My personal life, like pretty much everyone’s, is complex and sometimes messy.”
The best-selling author’s already-successful career shot into the stratosphere earlier this month. He thrust himself into the spotlight after breaking the story about the Obama administration’s widespread phone surveillance, as well as subsequent interviews with the person who leaked the information, Edward Snowden.
His path to the spotlight has been unconventional, to say the least.
Gawker also gets in on the act:
The BuzzFeed profile focused more on Greenwald’s personal and professional life, including his precocious entry into local politics (he ran for city council as a 17-year-old senior in high school), his decision, while still in law school at NYU, to join a high-paying corporate law firm that represented Goldman Sachs and other bankers (“It was just the symbolism” of the firm offering civil union benefits), and his mostly pro-bono work over the course of five years representing the first amendment rights of various neo-Nazis (“I was interested in defending political principles that I believed in. I didn’t even care about making money anymore.”)
The article also notes that Greenwald’s now-famously combative nature pre-dates his career as a journalist and writer. For instance, he has sued, on his own behalf, at least two landlords, once over an issue involving his dog’s weight, and American Airlines, when the company failed to deposit the correct amount of frequent flier miles into his account.
As for his personal life, BuzzFeed mentions his current relationship with David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian who was 19 when Greenwald met him in the mid-2000s, while on a two-month vacation in Rio to “figure out what [he] wanted to do next.”
“We instantly fell in love,” Greenwald said of meeting Miranda. Partly because of US laws preventing gay partners from gaining citizenship or permanent visas, Greenwald moved to Rio to be with Miranda. The couple have lived there now for eight years, with 10 rescued dogs.
While in Rio, Greenwald launched his blog, inspired by a report about George W. Bush’s authorization of NSA eavesdropping. The blog took off and, in 2007, Salon hired him and then, in 2012, he moved to the Guardian, where he’d eventually break the story that would make him a household name and the subject of stories about his porn business past and as well as idiotic threats from US lawmakers.
There is a lot going on in this case, and it takes something to push past all the machinations.
It is a fair question to talk motivations, and explore what else was going on in this case, like who/what may have prompted Edward Snowden and what else he is leaking that might be harmful.
But we also need not to lose sight and continue to shine light on the bigger picture of the depths of surveillance on U.S. citizens. and the depths this administration will go to to cover things up.