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60 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien
by the IRS.

After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de
Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet maga-
zine Salon. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against U.S.
government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal
privacy. The extent of his bitter antagonism toward the activities of
the "surveillance state," as he called it, was reflected in the title of
his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Val-
ues from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was
unrelenting, even when it came to the president. "By ordering illegal
eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be
held accountable for them," Greenwald wrote. When Barack Obama
became president in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking
the law by "ordering illegal eavesdropping." Because of his opposi-
tion to Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of
Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.

In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which
had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including
Snowden), from Salon to The Guardian. The British newspaper
shared his powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published
the WikiLeaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Manning
and published by Assange in 2010.

Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. He joined the
board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (eventu-
ally Runa Sandvik would join too). It had been set up expressly to
funnel money to both Assange's WikiLeaks site and the defense fund
for Manning after he was arrested. Such a financial intermediary
was necessary because American credit card companies were block-
ing money transfers to these two causes in 2012. This "blockade"
was taking its toll on WikiLeaks. According to Assange, "WikiLeaks
had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances." The
Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Bar-
low, one of the songwriters for the Grateful Dead, was one of its
chief financial backers. "The first serious info war is now engaged,"
Barlow declared. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks." He served with
Greenwald and Poitras on its board.

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