Glenn Greenwald is such a tool and such a bully.

He swaggered around blustering that his "client" and fellow anarchist Edward Snowden would release all the files he is hoarding if anything happened to him.

Here's what he said Saturday, and he has not denied saying this:

"Snowden has enough information to cause harm
to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever
had," Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the
Argentinean daily La Nacion.

"The
U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing
happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the
information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare."

There was no question that he implied that "America would get it in the neck" if anybody touched a hair on the head of Edward. Greenwald was happy to be the messenger with that gleeful news, and maybe it almost made up for the fact that he wasn't at the press conference at Sheremetyevo, and he wasn't the last one to publish an interview with Snowden (his buddies/rivals in WikiLeaks, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, were in Der Spiegel) and even that in fact he doesn't have the "dead man's switch" documents himself. (At least Assange sent around files named 256-something that his fanboyz could all release on cue during Cablegate, remember?)

We saw what you did there, Glenn, so this posturing and claiming that we "can't read" or you were "misunderstood" is arrant bullshit.

First of all, nobody takes seriously any threat that the US would kill Snowden. It's Russia that kills people — you know, lawyers, journalists, human rights workers, clergy, business people. It's Russia that just tried a dead man who was left to die in a prison cell because he was a real whistleblower on Russian criminality. That's why the creation of this outrageous propaganda stunt of yours, at this time, to the effect that the US "kills people" and your pal is "under threat of death" stinks of the hand of the KGB, Glenn. It stinks, on the day that Russia is trying to spin their verdict on a dead man — an outrageous stunt all its own.

And for Greenwald to claim that Snowden didn't really say he'd be killed and we were overblowing it if we took it at face value is especially duplicitious given that this is exactly what Snowden said at his press conference. So give it up.

Here's the translation of the La Nacion interview that Greenwald now supplies:

"A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US
government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the
history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His]
objective is to expose software that people around the world use without
knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing
to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public."

Um, really? Greenwald honestly expects us to a) first believe this incredible hyperbole and b) believe that It's Me, Eddie has only America's best interests in mind? You know, real whistleblowers — not to mention real human rights activists who don't feel they have to behave with civil disobedience to get their point across — don't feel they have to destroy the very institutions they are ostensibly reforming to make a point — let alone the very country they are supposedly improving. You know?

We're not stupid. Each time we use Gmail, we see those little ads to the side that Google "just knows" to place there based on the content of our emails. Google is scanning and reading and reacting to our email. It can get really hilarious. For example, because I have so many emails about cases of people being tortured in prison or attempts to prevent torture and such, Google constantly bombards me with ads for aspirin, pain relief, meditation, etc.

So yes, the big news — which wasn't news to anybody who in fact had reading comprehension the last decade — is that Verizon provides metadata from phone calls and Google and others make some metadata related to that sort of scanning available to the US government. They have protocols and procedures for this. They use this to fight crime. I know that doesn't fit with your worldview — crime as something committed by non-state actors, rather than states — but there it is, that's what most of us accept in a liberal democratic society — that non-state actors do commit crime and that citizens can't demand absolute encryption to prevent the state from legitimately prosecuting crime.

Neither Greenwald nor anyone else has been able to illustrate that Google or the NSA or any other party in fact looks at this material with sense and intelligence — you know, reading comprehension? — such as to actually interfere with correspondence, remove privacy, or stop communications or persecuate anyone on the grounds of such communications.

Say, no fair saying that "we wouldn't know" if this were done to us. We would. Because there are courts and Congress watching this even if they aren't open, and it is an institution — the kind that you disdain. If you  have a case that proves otherwise, bring it — but you haven't. And it's no good citing yet again the ubiquitous tandem of Wyden and Udall because they are not honest brokers on these issues; both are in the Google pocket and the hackers tank with anti-SOPA, anti-CISPA and other typically radical-geek positions. Few people when they see these names somehow demonstrative of "legitimate Congressional concern" realize these are the same pair that want to impose the socialist "net neutrality" gambit to undermine telecom business; they want to exonerate Aaron Swartz despite his serious hacking charges; they want to block intellectual property rights; and they want to have the president run relations with Big IT instead of having it under the rule of law with CISPA. Hey, you got what you paid for there.

Greenwald is now trying to back and fill and dodge his actual original threat by saying that he in fact answered that it "wasn't in their interests" for the US to kill Snowden. No. It's not. Because the US doesn't kill hackers. They kill themselves.

The LEAST credible claim of Greenwald is his whiny, self-serving "Better World" bullshit:

My point in this interview was clear, one I've repeated over and over:
had he wanted to harm the US government, he easily could have, but
hasn't, as evidenced by the fact that – as I said – he has all sorts of
documents that could inflict serious harm to the US government's
programs. That demonstrates how irrational is the claim that his intent
is to harm the US. His intent is to shine a light on these programs so
they can be democratically debated. That's why none of the disclosures
we've published can be remotely described as harming US national
security: all they've harmed are the reputation and credibility of US
officials who did these things and then lied about them.

Sorry, but this dog won't hunt. People who don't want to harm the US government, well, don't. They don't flee to Chinese territory and leak documents about how the US is trying to respond to Chinese hacking. Derp! This is just Leninist word-salading claiming that it's "irrational" to see harm in this "good" and it's typical of the old geek trick of inversion — trying to make it seem that the victim of hacking — the corporation or government or individuals — is to blame for his own attack because he didn't have good enough security. Why, the hacker was just helping by exposing an exploit *cough*.

Frankly, Greenwald is hardly a credible judge of what is or isn't a harm to the US as he has spent his entire career trying to inflict wounds on a country he doesn't feel comfortable in.

And as for "democratic discussion," if you want a democratic discussion, you, um, have it democratically with due process. With existing institutions of civil society, Congress, the media, the courts. Not criminal hacking and fugitive leaking.

Even more absurd is the idea that the US — which has been hacked, and which is the victim of hackers — is to blame for Snowden fleeing to Russia:

2) The US government has acted with wild irrationality. The current
criticism of Snowden is that he's in Russia. But the reason he's in
Russia isn't that he chose to be there. It's because the US blocked him
from leaving: first by revoking his passport (with no due process or
trial), then by pressuring its allies to deny airspace rights to any
plane they thought might be carrying him to asylum (even one carrying
the democratically elected president of a sovereign state), then by
bullying small countries out of letting him land for re-fueling.

Um, wild irrationality? That would be going to Russia, land of the unfree, and not manning up even as much as Manning, to face the music in your own country.

Hey, if Edward Snowden feels his leaks do not harm the United States of America, let him return home, face the court of law and the court of public opinion and the court of the media and prove that. Surely justice will be on his side?  If you don't believe American justice is worlds apart from Russian or Chinese justice, then why the charade about a "democratic discussion"?

Sovereign states can revoke passports on the grounds they determine; there is no universal international law entitling everyone to a passport in the way implied. Airspace is also about sovereignty and every country gets to deny foreign aircraft from their territory. If democratically elected presidents of a sovereign state want to behave like such, then they don't embrace the democracy-wreckers who are defectors from another democratic state.

The debate is not really about national security or the limits of surveillance. The debate is about the state, period, and that's how anarchists want it to be. They would like the state to crumble and themselves to take power. We are not required to let them.