The Brazilian government is charging journalist Glenn Greenwald with committing cybercrimes, according to a criminal complaint released Monday. The accusations are connected to leaked text messages that Greenwald reported on last year for The Intercept Brasil, which the outspoken journalist launched in 2016 as a spinoff of the US-based news site he founded two years before. Digital rights advocates decried the move, pointing to a troubling, longtime tendency of governments worldwide to spin up hacking charges against security researchers and journalists.
The leak in question revealed unethical behavior and conflicts of interest among some law enforcement officials in Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro's administration. The criminal complaint, first reported by The New York Times, claims that the leak and Greenwald's reporting undermined the credibility of a government anticorruption organization. More importantly, it accuses Greenwald of actively participating in the illegal interception of the leaked messages rather than simply reporting on data he was given.
Greenwald issued a stern response in a statement to the Daily Beast on Tuesday. "I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist—ethically and within the law," Greenwald wrote. "We will not be intimidated by these tyrannical attempts to silence journalists."
The government asserts that the "criminal organization" it links Greenwald to separately perpetrated multiple types of cybercrimes. The complaint accuses six core members of the group and extensively maps their alleged relationships and interactions. It asserts that the group was involved in bank fr ..
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