Glenn Greenwald says Brazil charges are part of a global trend to criminalize journalism – Thehour.com

Joseph Marks, The Washington Post

American journalist Glenn Greenwald says the Brazilian government's charges against him are the latest strike in a global campaign by governments across the world to use anti-hacking laws to punish and silence journalists.

"Governments [are] figuring out how they can criminalize journalism based on large-scale digital leaks," Greenwald told me.

Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on leaked documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2014, says the charges are baseless. "Even in democracies -let alone in the authoritarian world - there's a real struggle to make the law fit criminalizing leaks of this sort," he said.

Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, is facing charges stemming from his reporting on leaked cellphone messages that raised doubts about a corruption investigation that aided the rise of Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Greenwald is accused of being part of a "criminal organization" that allegedly hacked into public officials' cellphones last year to copy messages that were published on his news site, the Intercept Brazil.

Greenwald compared the Brazilian charges against him to the Trump administration's controversial decision to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last year under the main U.S. anti-hacking law, the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

"I've been particularly concerned given the Bolsonaro government's subservience to and admiration for the Trump government that they'd look to the precedent the Trump government used to indict Julian Assange," he told me, "trying to concoct a dubious or tenuous theory that he went beyond passing information to participating in the crime itself."

The charges come as officials in the United States and elsewhere have faced years of criticism for not updating decades-old hacking laws, which critics say are overly broad and can be used to criminalize innocuous work by anyone who deals with computer networks or large digital files including security researchers and journalists.

Brazilian prosecutors allege Greenwald crossed a line by encouraging his anonymous sources to delete their copies of stolen messages to evade detection. That explanation drew quick criticism from press freedom advocates in the United States and Brazil who said it criminalized reporters advising their sources on how to work securely. Greenwald told me he'd scrupulously followed Brazilian law and called the charges "an obvious attempt to attack a free press."

In the Assange case, meanwhile, U.S. prosecutors say he violated the law by offering to help then-military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning decipher a password so she could get greater access to a military database and pass more secrets to WikiLeaks. Cybersecurity experts at the time criticized the Trump administration for stretching the 34-year-old CFAA law to fit a situation its authors never could have envisioned.

Press freedom advocates were less eager than Greenwald to draw a comparison between the charges against him and Assange. Gabe Rottman, technology and press freedom director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that Assange's offer to help a source crack a password could be deemed illegal under a reasonable reading of the CFAA, while Greenwald's alleged advice to sources on security does not violate ethical or legal principles. Rottman, who's written extensively about the Assange charges, says he takes this view even though he considers the CFAA so out of pace with modern technology that it can be applied in an unconstitutional manner in many cases.

Greenwald acknowledged there may be important distinctions between his actions and Assange's, but he described the two cases as on the same "slippery slope." Greenwald also warned they could lead to reporters being prosecuted for common journalistic practices such as urging sources to contact them using encrypted apps or accepting document leaks through online tools that anonymize the sender.

"There's a general aversion to defending Assange by press freedom groups because they don't see Assange as a journalist and they do see me as one," he said. "But there's no question the [Assange] indictment encourages governments to criminalize a person in the role of a journalist."

Greenwald added in a statement that he hasn't been detained and plans to keep publishing.

Though Greenwald has ruffled some feathers in Washington with his reporting on leaked information, he is getting strong support from many lawmakers.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said the charges will have a "chilling effect" on journalism and said he's crafting legislation to protect journalists from prosecution.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., called the charges "a step backwards that hurts Brazil."

"No journalist should face prosecution for reporting critical facts about the government or politicians," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in an emailed statement reported by the Intercept.

Advocacy groups also came to Greenwald's defense.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the charges an "outrageous assault on the freedom of the press."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation called them "a threat to democracy" that "discourages journalists from using technology to best serve the public."

Even some former intelligence community officials jumped in. Here's former NSA attorney Susan Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who runs the Lawfare blog:

House impeachment managers and President Donald Trump's defenders agreed early this morningon ground rules for his historic Senate impeachment trial. That trial's sure to delve into conspiracy theories the president embraced that cast doubt on Russia's hacking and disinformation campaign against the 2016 election and hacking threats facing 2020.

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