Weekly Q&A with Glenn Greenwald: August 14th, 2026

All right, let's get to the questions.

Enough of the, the prefix.

The first one is from Anonymous Ryan who says this: "Hey, Glenn, saw you went on Tucker's show again.

I guess I want to understand the connection between the surveillance state and two, Barry Weiss or Free Press and Flock.

You talked about how they use the same language that the NSA people used during your Snowden days.

Can you maybe draw a propaganda through line for us from the war on terror earlier to the present?" Yeah, I, you know, actually this was something I wasn't really planning on, on talking about.

I didn't...

I think maybe Tucker's team had sent a few questions.

I don't necessarily even always look at them because sometimes I prefer not to know.

Uh, so the conversation's less stilted, less prepared.

You know, you almost inevitably, if you know the questions, you'll start even in your head when, if you don't want to, kind of like thinking about points and, and sometimes it can deprive the, uh, the, the conversation of that organic nature that I think is so important.

But anyway, uh, this is something I thought a lot about over the last, say, 15 years because I've been covering surveillance.

You know, as a matter of fact, surveillance was one of the very first things on which I most focused when I just created my blog in 2005.

I had started off on mostly covering the war on terror, and then it was...

I, I started my blog in October 20- 2005, and it was December of 2005 when the New York Times broke their, what became their Pulitzer Prize-winning story that the Bush administration shortly after 9/11 had ordered the NSA to spy on communications of American citizens internationally without the warrants required by law, and created this whole panoply of theories as to why the president's not bound by congressional law when it comes to spying and domestic surveillance and national security, and that really became my main focus.

That's probably more than anything what attracted an audience quickly to, to my blog.

And, and so I've been thinking about surveillance for 20 years.

Obviously, when I did the Snowden story, it was preceded by many years of reporting on surveillance, thinking about it, talking about it, talking about privacy.

That's why Edward Snowden came to me, one of the reasons.

And then, of course, the years of the Snowden reporting and then many years after that as well with big tech and the privacy incursions it entails.

And I think one of the things that we sometimes forget is that this link between state surveillance on the one hand in foreign policy wars The Pentagon on the other is not a speculative one.

It doesn't take much effort or energy or work in order to detect.

In fact, it takes none because the NSA was one of those agencies created as part of the US National Security state.

It is technically part of the Pentagon.

It is part of our war fighting, it is part of our foreign policy, it is part of our defense policy.