Glenn Edward Greenwald was born in March 6, 1967, New York, New York and raised in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, where his grandfather was a city councilman.
Greenwald’s youthful ambition was politics. He became the first teenager on the county parks and recreation board. While a senior in high school, at 17, he ran unsuccessfully for the city council. After graduating from high school, Greenwald enrolled in George Washington University where he majored in philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1990.
He then attended the New York University School of Law earning a Juris Doctor in 1994. His debate skills helped secure him a job at a prominent law firm that represented rich and powerful clients. Dissatisfied with the work, he came out as a gay man and began his own law firm. Greenwald believed that as social outcasts, gay people tend to be more willing to challenge authority.
In 2005 Greenwald launched a blog, Unclaimed Territory. He focused on unbridled government surveillance versus first-amendment rights. In 2006 he published “How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok,” which became a New York Times best seller. Four of the five books he has written have been on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
He gained notoriety for providing the international media with classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents illegally obtained by Edward Snowden.
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 programs, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. The disclosure exposed controversial U.S. government surveillance activities.
The series on which Greenwald worked, along with others, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
When the United States soldier formerly known as Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) was arrested for stealing secret government documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and disseminating them to WikiLeaks, Greenwald came to Manning’s defense. He characterized Manning’s intentions as “politically insightful, astute and thoughtful.”
Greenwald published an article praising President Obama for his support of same-sex marriage. For Greenwald the matter was personal. In 2005 he left the United States to pursue a relationship with a Brazilian man, David Miranda. Of Obama’s endorsement Greenwald stated, “It is a powerful message to gay youth that their sexual orientation is neither a flaw nor an abnormality.”
In February 2014 he became, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. Greenwald was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.
“Gay issues are about the same fundamental issues as other civil liberties questions—the rights of the individual.”
