| ® | 60 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS. After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet maga- zine Salon. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against U.S. government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy. The extent of his bitter antagonism toward the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Val- ues from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote. When Barack Obama became president in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.” Because of his opposi- tion to Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money. In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which © had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including re) Snowden), from Salon to The Guardian. The British newspaper shared his powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the WikiLeaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Manning and published by Assange in 2010. Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. He joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (eventu- ally Runa Sandvik would join too). It had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s WikiLeaks site and the defense fund for Manning after he was arrested. Such a financial intermediary was necessary because American credit card companies were block- ing money transfers to these two causes in 2012. This “blockade” was taking its toll on WikiLeaks. According to Assange