Crooked Media's newish podcast, Pod Save the World, has a great 45 minute interview with The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who has been a long-time journalist and constitutional lawyer. His biggest journalist contribution of recent note, of course, was the work he did to sift through and communicate the files and intel Edward Snowden brought to bear. Much of the interview focuses on the Snowden situation and his book, No Place to Hide, but there are some amazing nuggets about how and why Snowden did what he did, national security, and privacy in the modern era.
Of note:
[Snowden's] overwhelming priority was to make sure he meet with the journalists with whom he had selected and safely provide that material to us and review that material with us to make certain we that understood what we needed to understand, and start reporting it.
The fear of being detained before he could get the materials into the journalists hands was felt in both of the recent films about him (Snowden and Citizenfour, the latter of which Greenwald plays a significant role). But the extrapolation of this narrative by Greenwald is fascinating to listen to all over again. The places Snowden goes to, how he instructs the journalists to secure their communication, and the delivery of only some of the materials after he poured over them himself -- essentially, the high-level decision-making around how, why, and with whom to share such sensitive, earth-rattling intel is still to this day underreported and underappreciated. As Greenwald notes, he could have dumped the entirety of the files to Wikileaks and had the whole thing publicly revealed, but instead he took the time to read, understand, and to the best of his ability, share the right kinds of files that we as Americans must trust are the most important aspects of what he had access to that infringe upon our rights as US citizens.