By Edward Snowden in the Washington Post on Jan 26, 2020, excerpt:
“On Tuesday, Brazilian federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and founding editor at the Intercept Brazil, for his explosive reporting on corruption at the very highest levels of Brazil’s government.
The public importance of these stories was staggering. For example, one of the revelations exposed how a well-known judge named Sergio Moro had rigged a trial to jail the country’s most popular political figure in the run-up to the presidential election, clearing a path to victory for Jair Bolsonaro, who then promptly rewarded Moro with control of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
Given this context, it’s understandable why a significant portion of Brazilian politicians — including even some aligned with the disgraced Bolsonaro regime — have chosen to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with press freedom organizations in denouncing these preposterous “cybercrime” charges as an act of political repression.
Yet as ridiculous as these charges are, they are also dangerous — and not only to Greenwald: They are a threat to press freedom everywhere.
The legal theory used by the Brazilian prosecutors — that journalists who publish leaked documents are engaged in a criminal “conspiracy” with the sources who provide those documents — is virtually identical to the one advanced in the Trump administration’s indictment of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange in a new application of the historically dubious Espionage Act….” (read more in Washington Post here)