Greenwald who has stayed in his second home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since he had begun launching stories about NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance last year had foretold his former employer Salon.com that he might return to the U.S. if in fact won the Polk Award for Journalism. That happened yesterday. He, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian, and Barton Gellman from The Washington Post got the award for their reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks. This is highly significant. There have been frank attempts to criminalize in particular Greenwald as Snowden’s accomplice, (or was it vice versa?). Greenwald grimly twittered today that the Polk Award is for excellence in terrorism.

In the UK government, this is known as the George Polk Award for Excellence in Terrorism http://t.co/K4Wr5vrjVf

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 17, 2014

The awards (26 other journalists had been awarded for something else) will be presented at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on April 11. Whether Greenwald and Poitras, who is currently living in Berlin, Germany, will collect the award is unclear. We’ll see how low the U.S., which has dropped to rank 46 (same leage as Romania and Haiti) of the recent World Press Freedom Index 2014 (from a more decent 32 in 2013), has actually sunken as regards the First Amendment of its Constitution. After having been caught in nullifying its Fourth Amendment.