http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/?hp=ar
By SEUNG MIN KIM |
6/9/13 10:18 AM EDT
Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald said in an interview Sunday that he has not heard from law enforcement authorities about his reporting into the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics.
“Any time they would like to speak to me, I would be more than happy to speak to them,” Greenwald said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution and the very First Amendment of which guarantees a free press.”
Greenwald reported last week that under a government order, Verizon has turned over millions of phone records to the NSA as part of a vast data-mining program. A follow-up article from Greenwald reported that the government collected 97 billion pieces of data in March.
He also shed some insight into the motivations of his sources.
“They risked their careers and their lives and their liberty because what they were seeing being done in secret inside the United States government is so alarming and so pernicious that they simply want one thing,” Greenwald said. “That is, for the American people at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, and what the capabilities are, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.”
Greenwald pushed back against comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who called the disclosures of the surveillance programs “reckless.”
“The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus about any accountability who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing,” Greenwald said. “There is no national security harm from letting people know that they are collecting all phone records, that they are tapping into the Internet, that they are planning massive cyberattacks -- both foreign and even domestic.”
