Those who have most enlightened us in the past couple of years about war crimes, wrongdoings, illicit surveillance of our governments in the name of a more and more absurd “Global War on Terrorism” have effectively been locked up in the meantime. Twenty-five-year-old Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning has disappeared in a brig for an incredible 35 years to come. Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of the whistle-blower platform WikiLeaks, is locked up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012. Thirty-year-old former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has went into hiding in Russia after having provided the Guardian and the Washington Post with files exposing highly effective attempts of NSA and their British counterpart GCHQ of installing total surveillance states. And the reporter of the Guardian newspaper, who has written most about Snowden’s files, Glenn Greenwald, can’t move safely anymore from his home in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

That Greenwald’s status as a journalist has aggressively been questioned by his mainstream colleagues who have even tried to criminalize his work is a scandal in its own. In one of his final columns at The Guardian, before moving on to a new media venture together with The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, Greenwald characterized most of “established” journalism as already dead.

In times of perpetual wars (on terror, on whistle-blowers, on journalists) and, now surfaced, Orwellian mass surveillance, journalism has to further evolve. What eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has in mind when asking Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras to join for a new enterprise, we’ll see.

19 October 2013 @ 9:25 am.

Last modified October 19, 2013.