U.S.
New revelations about the National Security Agency's vast surveillance program have appeared on a regular basis in newspapers around the globe since Edward Snowden first leaked NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian -- and Snowden and Greenwald themselves haven't stopped causing international stirs since breaking the story in June.
On Friday and Saturday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside a convention center in Hamburg, Germany in support of Snowden, the NSA contractor turned document leaker, transparency activist and U.S. fugitive.
On Friday, at the annual hackers conference called the Chaos Communications Congress, or 30C3, Greenwald, who left the Guardian in October, gave a speech via videoconference about the media frenzy following the leaks.
Greenwald hasn't shied away from criticizing the perceived complacency of U.S. media and politicians in the face of revelations about the NSA's collection of Americans' and other people's phone records and emails. But at the 30C3 on Friday, he took the opportunity to lambast American and British politicians and media organizations more harshly and directly than before.
"[W]e knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the United States and British media," Greenwald said.
Greenwald said the media had become beholden to the demands of politicians.
"(Their role) is not to be adversarial," he said. "Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight."
Greenwald also criticized tech companies -- notably NSA collaborator Palantir -- for using hip language to woo young people into lives of government spying.
Greenwald also hinted that more revelations about the NSA would come out soon, including information that the NSA and its British counterpart the Government Communications Headquarters, are attempting to intercept in-flight Internet service.
Greenwald’s remarks were some of the most extensive he's given on the NSA leaks. They came less than a week after the Washington Post published a lengthy interview with Snowden, in which he defended his actions and said he hoped security and surveillance networks could be improved by the information he leaked.
"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," he told the Post. "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."
While Snowden and Greenwald have been successful in keeping media attention on the NSA scandal, it's unclear how much has changed since the leaks began appearing in media in June.
On Friday, a New York-based federal judge ruled that the NSA's programs were constitutional, and did not violate the privacy of Americans.
That ruling was in stark contrast to another federal judge's ruling this month that said the NSA was likely in violation of the U.S. constitution.
And while the Obama administration has expressed some desire to reform the NSA's data collection, no policy changes have been put into place. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced this week that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, will hold a hearing Jan. 14 on the findings of a presidential task force about the NSA's sprawling program.
But because of the relative inaction on a federal level, and the disparate outcomes of the federal court cases, it has become increasingly likely the ultimate fate of the NSA's programs will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Al Jazeera
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