# Glenn Greenwald Constitutional-law litigator (b. 1967) turned blogger (*Unclaimed Territory*, 2005; Salon, 2007–12), *Guardian* columnist, and the journalist to whom [[Edward Snowden]] brought the NSA archive in 2013. The Snowden reporting ([[Snowden Revelations]]) won the *Guardian* and the *Washington Post* the Pulitzer for public service in 2014 and made Greenwald, for a few years, the most prominent civil-liberties journalist in the world. He co-founded [[The Intercept]] with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2014, funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and left it in October 2020 after editors declined to run a pre-election piece on Hunter Biden as he wrote it — a departure he framed as censorship and the outlet framed as editing. ## The trajectory From 2020 he built an independent operation: a Substack, then from 2022 a nightly show, *System Update*, on [[Rumble]], the platform the vault tracks as the right's [[YouTube]] alternative. He returned to [[Substack]] in February 2026, ending the Rumble show after three years and saying he wanted to get back to "written reporting and long investigations." In between he was the journalist behind the 2019 "Vaza Jato" leaks in Brazil, which exposed the Lava Jato prosecutors' collusion with the judge (Sergio Moro) who jailed Lula — reporting that got him charged by Bolsonaro's government (the charges were dismissed) and that is why he is a fixture of the Brazilian left even as his American audience moved right. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. ## Why he is in the vault He is the vault's principal case of the **left-to-right-platform trajectory**: politics that begin in anti-surveillance, anti-war civil libertarianism and end up delivered through right-populist channels — a regular on [[Tucker Carlson]]'s show, a critic of "Russiagate," of the [[NSA]] and of the security state, and of the Democratic Party's alliance with the intelligence agencies, cited from both directions in the [[Horseshoe Theory]] debate. His own account is that he did not move; the media did, and the outlets willing to air an attack on the [[Crypto Wars and Encryption Policy]] consensus or on the [[Whistleblower Suppression Arc]] are now on the right. Critics say the destination shapes the content, and point to how rarely the show's criticism landed on its hosts' allies. Both readings can be true, which is what makes him useful to think with — see [[MAGA]] and [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] for the ecosystem he moved through, and [[Matt Taibbi]] for the parallel case. ## See Also - [[Edward Snowden]] · [[Snowden Revelations]] · [[NSA]] · [[NSA and the Telecommunications Industry]] · [[History of Surveillance Technology]] - [[The Intercept]] · [[Substack]] · [[Substack Timeline]] · [[Rumble]] · [[Tucker Carlson]] - [[Horseshoe Theory]] · [[Matt Taibbi]] · [[MAGA]] · [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] - [[Crypto Wars and Encryption Policy]] · [[Whistleblower Suppression Arc]] · [[Jair Bolsonaro]]