Published on Tuesday, July 2, 2013 by Common Dreams
Obama administration's objective with Snowden is "to intimidate future whistleblowers from coming forward"
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
"The world will be shocked" by the next story on the National Security Agency's vast spying operations, said Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist leading the exposure—made possible by leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden—of the agency's far-reaching surveillance.
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| Glenn Greenwald (R) speaking with Eric Bolling on Fox & Friends about the ongoing revelations of NSA spying and whistleblower Edward Snowden. |
Speaking Tuesday morning with conservative host Eric Bolling on Fox News' Fox & Friends, Greenwald hinted that a new NSA story was forthcoming and potentially explosive.
When asked if he was ready to unveil a new NSA scoop, Greenwald responded:
I will say that there are vast programs of both domestic and international spying that the world will be shocked to learn about that the NSA is engaged in with no democratic accountability, and that's what's driving our reporting.
Greenwald also gave a preview of this next exposé over the weekend during a speech given to the Socialism 2013 conference, saying it would report on "a brand new technology [that] enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its own repositories one billion cell phones calls every single day."
The example the Obama administration is setting with Snowden, Greenwald explained to Bolling, is to give a warning to future whistleblowers that the repercussions will be swift and harsh.
I think what the Obama administration wants and has been trying to establish for the last almost five years now with the unprecedented war on whistleblowers that it is waging is to make it so that everybody is petrified of coming forward with information about what our political officials are doing in the dark that is deceitful, illegal or corrupt.
They don't care about Edward Snowden at this point; he can no longer do anything that he hasn't already done. What they care about is making an extremely negative example out of him to intimidate future whistleblowers from coming forward because they'll think that they're going to end up like him. That's their objective.
On what he sees as "Snowden's endgame," Greenwald, who said he has not seen the whistleblower since he left Hong Kong, replied:
Well, from the very first time that I spoke with him he said that he completely understood that once he came forward against the U.S. government and the Obama administration that he would become the most wanted man on earth, and would be hunted down by the world's most powerful state, and that he felt that it was worthwhile to do that because he could not in good conscience allow this massive spying program aimed at the American people to be constructed in the dark. And he said obviously he wants to stay out of the clutches of the U.S. government given the way they've persecuted whistleblowers. He's obviously trying to find a place where he can do that but his real goal is to continue to be part of the conversation about why he did what he did, what it is that he saw in the NSA, how these spying powers were being abused, and to continue to make people around the world and his fellow citizens in the United States aware of what their government is doing.
Later on the program, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. said that Greenwald has been "involved with the WikiLeaks" and "has it a little bit mixed up." Johnson called Greenwald "almost a flack, the alter-ego for the media" for Snowden.
In the interview with Bolling, Greenwald explained:
This is what journalism is about—shining a light on what the most powerful people in the country are doing to them in the dark.
Johnson said that "transparency is the issue"—not the transparency of the U.S. government, officials or the NSA's vast surveillance program—but about Mr. Greenwald, whom he said may be an "advocacy journalist," not "merely a reporter."
