Re: Greenwald's Negative Reaction to the Book "Snowden Files"

[Glenn] Greenwald’s more abrasive side surfaces when the subject turns to a Guardian book, The Snowden Files, by Luke Harding, published in early February. “It is a bullshit book,” he says. “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. Luke came here 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.”

At the time of our lunch, Greenwald had only read extracts from Harding’s book, which he thought put far too much emphasis on some youthful anonymous online posts that Snowden once wrote. Later, after reading the whole book, he would tell me by email that it did not trash Snowden.

  Financial Times

In fact, the book is very complementary of Snowden and also of Greenwald.

I am a huge Greenwald fan, in spite of his sometimes abrasive arrogance, and have been following him since he first began blogging. I think Glenn gets his dander up fairly readily and started complaining about the book based on what he THOUGHT it was going to be. He made a couple of snide remarks on his Twitter account when the book was first published, but I haven’t seen anything since.

I also think the “youthful posts” from Snowden that Greenwald objected to were interesting and informative to the development of Snowden the whistleblower. It has made me change my view of Snowden to something which I think is probably more realistic: a somewhat (if not very) arrogant young tech geek (his name on Ars Technica forums was “TheTrueHOOHA”) traveling the world, in a high-glamour high-security game of intrigue, yet with a good deal of moral integrity, who suddenly had the wool removed from his eyes.

I think an apology for Greenwald’s first comments about the author would not be inappropriate, but I don’t see Greenwald as the apologetic type.