In a recent interview with The Financial Times, journalist Glenn Greenwald criticized a book on former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden published this month by his former employer, The Guardian.
“It is a bullshit book,” Greenwald said, referring to “The Snowden Files” by Luke Harding. “They are purporting to tell the inside story of Edward Snowden but it is written by someone who has never met or even spoken to Edward Snowden.”
The book, whose full title is “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man,” bills itself as “the story of the individuals behind the biggest intelligence leak in history and the forces that tried to stop them.” It was published earlier this month by The Guardian’s publishing imprint. Greenwald was working for The Guardian when he first received documents on NSA surveillance programs from Snowden.
Greenwald also told The Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer that Harding came to Brazil, where Greenwald lives, while working on the book and “talked to me for half a day without [my] realising that he was trying to get me to write his book for him. I cut the interview off when I realised what he was up to.”
Greenwald had only read portions of the book at the time of the interview, but from what he had read, he thought the book put too much emphasis on anonymous postings Snowden once wrote online. According to Dyer, Greenwald later sent an email after reading the whole book, saying that the book did not actually trash Snowden.
