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Greenwald: Snowden ‘kept harassing me’

Gabe Finger Contributor
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Glenn Greenwald told The New York Times Magazine that not only did he ignore multiple e-mails from Edward Snowden, but that he also found the National Security Agency leaker who propelled his career to new heights to be “harassing.”

“It’s really annoying and complicated, the encryption software,” Greenwald told The New York Times Magazine. “He kept harassing me, but at some point he just got frustrated, so he went to Laura.”

The Laura that Greenwald refers to, Laura Poitras, was the main subject of the magazine piece, which detailed many previously unknown aspects of the process of Snowden’s leaks, as well as covered Poitras, a lesser-known but crucial part of the leaks.

Poitras, a documentary filmmaker whose work has led to allegations that have landed on her restrictive flying lists, introduced Snowden to Greenwald electronically, convincing the civil libertarian reporter to take the former NSA analyst seriously.

From his Rio de Janeiro home, Greenwald told the Times Magazine of his feelings of “ecstasy and elation” when he saw Snowden’s documents for the first time.

“We couldn’t believe just how momentous this occasion was,” Greenwald said. “When you read these documents, you get a sense of the breadth of them. It was a rush of adrenaline and ecstasy and elation. You feel you are empowered for the first time because there’s this mammoth system that you try and undermine and subvert and shine a light on — but you usually can’t make any headway, because you don’t have any instruments to do it — [and now] the instruments were suddenly in our lap.”

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