Media
Director of Oscar-winning documentary 'Seaching For Sugar Man' dead at 36
Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, who won an Oscar for his 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man, died in Stockholm on Tuesday, the TT news agency reported. He was 36.
The circumstances of his death were not immediately clear, but police said it was not a murder. They gave no other details of where the death took place, but said the body was found in the afternoon.
First-time director Bendjelloul won best documentary feature Academy Award last year for Searching for Sugar Man, which told the story of a musician who became famous without knowing it.
Sixto Rodriguez made two albums in the early 1970s but then quit music -- but while he disappeared, his records became major hits notably in South Africa.
Searching for Sugar Man won various other awards, including best documenary prizes from Britain´s BAFTA and the Directors Guild of America last year, as well as two world cinema prizes at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Born to an Algerian father and a Swedish mother in 1977 in the small southern town of Ystad, the young filmmaker moved to Stockholm as his career became more successful.
Bendjelloul first discovered Rodriguez while travelling for six months in Africa in 2006, and was fascinated by his story.
Rodriquez, the son of a Mexican immigrant family, was discovered by two producers in a bar. They helped him record his first album, Cold Fact, in 1970.
It was a critical success, but did not sell well. The next year, when he started working with another producer, came his second record "Coming from Reality." Again, it showcased Rodriguez's talent, but flopped commercially.
Taking the hint, the young Rodriguez gave up his musical ambitions, and went off to work in the construction industry.
But while his records failed to take off at home, by accident a bootleg copy made it to South Africa, where it struck a chord with progressive young whites, exasperated with the apartheid system.
His success there was such that, given the fact that the artist himself was not around, bizarre stories began to emerge about him, including one that claimed that he had committed suicide by setting himself alight on stage.
In the end, the curiosity of two young fans broke through the myths: they found he was still alive, living in the United States. They brought him to South Africa where he was greeted as a hero in 1998, playing six sold-out concerts.
Searching for Sugar Man tells the story of those two fans' search for Rodriguez, and of his musical renaissance.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Alec Baldwin calls NYC 'carnival of stupidity' in Twitter rant over traffic ticket
Actor Alec Baldwin took to Twitter to vent his anger on Tuesday after being detained by police in New York for riding his bicycle the wrong way down a street.
The 56-year-old star was left furious after an altercation with police on Fifth Avenue Manhattan's Flatiron district following the traffic stop.
Baldwin, who lives in nearby Greenwich Village, received two summonses for disorderly conduct and riding the wrong way down a one-way street, a New York Police Department spokesman told AFP. He was released shortly after being detained.
But Baldwin, who has a history of fiery public outbursts, responded to the incident with a series of angry posts on his Twitter feed.
"Officer Moreno, badge number 23388, arrested me and handcuffed me for going the wrong way on Fifth Ave" Baldwin wrote.
"Meanwhile, photographers outside my home ONCE AGAIN terrified my daughter and nearly hit her with a camera. The police did nothing.
"New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign."
Baldwin must appear in court on July 24, police said.
Baldwin, a longtime star of television and the big screen, in addition to Broadway, fronted the Up Late chat show last October and November but ratings struggled.
He was sacked after allegedly subjecting a photographer to a homophobic slur outside his apartment on the day that a Canadian actress convicted of stalking him was jailed.
In a profanity-laden article in New York Magazine in February, the actor said he was finished with public life and that the Big Apple no longer offers his baby daughter a "normal" life.
"I just can't live in New York anymore. Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave," he wrote.
The nearly 5,300-word rant denied allegations that he insulted gays and lashed out furiously against the media, the city where he has lived since 1979 and U.S. public life in general.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Thriller from beyond grave: New posthumous album of Michael Jackson songs released
Self-styled King of Pop Michael Jackson is back from the grave again this week with a second posthumous album of songs recorded before his death in 2009.
"Xscape" went on sale in the United States on Tuesday, after being released in various European countries at the weekend and on Monday.
"This music has never been (previously) released," said L.A. Reid, the veteran American music mogul behind the project, on NBC television's "Today" breakfast program.
"Some of it has been leaked through the years.... but it wasn't widespread," said Reid, who sifted through a vault full of unreleased Jackson material to handpick the songs that appear on the album.
"I just listened to the songs that Michael sang completely from top to bottom, you know, multiple times," Reid said. "That was my guide -- and the ones that I thought had great melodies that would still stand up today."
Several critics have hailed "Xscape" as a clear improvement on 2010's "Michael," the first album released after Jackson died of a drug overdose at age 50, as part of a multi-record deal with Sony Music Entertainment.
"From the first, there was the voice .....Nearly five years after his death, that voice remains, and is at its most powerful on the new album," wrote the Los Angeles Times' reviewer.
The new album "feels shockingly vital, as though the producers charged with re-imagining this work had harnessed dance floor defibrillators," he wrote.
Ben Greenman of the New Yorker magazine called the album "a completely different beast from 'Michael'... Rather than rely on fragments or partial ideas, Reid focused on songs that were worked through by Michael from start to finish..."
Ironically, the songs on "Xscape" include one about child sex abuse, an issue that badly tarnished the King of Pop despite his acquittal of sexual molestation charges in 2005.
Jackson's executors have worked hard to pay off the enormous debts left by the fallen star, with key projects including the "This is It" film of rehearsals for the doomed world tour he was planning before he died in 2009.
"Michael" has sold a relatively modest 540,000 copies, according to Billboard magazine, which noted that Jackson's overall record sales were less than both Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash last year.
"Xscape" comprises eight songs chosen from the vast catalogue which Jackson worked on over four decades but which did not make it into any of his iconic albums like 1982's "Thriller" or 1987's "Bad."
The songs are based on original vocals by Jackson, who often made multiple recordings of tunes he was working on, but with music "contemporized" by a variety of producers for a modern audience.
While fans had to wait until this week to actually hear all the songs, the titles had been released in advance.
They included "Xscape," first produced 15 years ago, and "Do You Know Where Your Children Are." The latter is about "kids being raised in a broken family where the father comes home drunk and the mother is out prostituting and the kids run away from home and they become the victims," according to the liner notes.
US rapper Timbaland, executive producer on "Xscape," said they were keenly aware of the need for the new Jackson record to stand up against the best that current pop music has to offer.
"How would I hear this on the radio against Katy Perry? Would it sound old, would it sound new?" asked the producer, who works closely with Justin Timberlake and Beyonce.
He "had to make sure that it can compete with everything that is going on today in the pop world," Timbaland told Billboard.
Imprisoned in Egypt, hunger-striking Al-Jazeera journalist is close to death
Egyptian authorities move him from prison cell
Jailed Al-Jazeera journalist Abdullah el-Shamy, who has been on hunger strike in Egypt for more than 100 days, is near to death according to his doctor.
"He has started to have impaired liver and kidney function," said the doctor, Mohamed Osama el-Homsi. "It means that his organs are in danger."
He has lost a third of his body weight. El-Homsi said El-Shamy's condition was life-threatening and he could "die within a few days".
He was moved from his cell in Tora prison to an undisclosed location after his lawyer, Shaaban Saeed, asked the authorities to transfer him to hospital.
El-Shamy was arrested on 14 August last year while covering a violent police raid on a Cairo mosque where supporters of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's toppled president, were holding a sit-in. He has never been charged.
In a letter from prison a week ago, El-Shamy said he was questioned by guards on two consecutive days who urged him to give up his hunger strike.
Three other Al-Jazeera English journalists are also being held in Tora prison: the former BBC correspondent Peter Greste, Cairo bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohammed. They were detained on 29 December last year.
They have been charged with spreading false news and aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that the current Egyptian government considers to be a "terrorist" organisation. Their trial is due to resume on Thursday (15 May).
Al Jazeera strongly denies the accusations made against all its staff and has called on the Egyptian authorities to free them, as have the British and Ameriucan governments.
Sources: Al-Jazeera/Daily News Egypt
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Torture spreading as its use is 'normalized' by TV shows like '24,' says Amnesty International
Torture is rampant across the world and has become almost normalized by the "war on terror" and its glamorous portrayal in shows such as "24" and "Homeland," Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
The London-based human rights group is launching a new campaign aimed at ending torture, which it says remains widespread even 30 years after a blanket prohibition was agreed by the United Nations.
In the past five years, Amnesty says it has recorded incidents in 141 countries, including 79 of the 155 signatories to the 1984 UN Convention against Torture.
The global survey of 21,000 people in 21 countries also revealed a widespread dread of the practice, with 44 percent saying they feared being abused if they were taken into custody.
Yet over a third percent of the respondents said they believed torture was sometimes necessary and acceptable to gain information that may protect the public.
"It's almost become normalized, it's become routine," Amnesty secretary general Salil Shetty told reporters at the launch of the "Stop Torture" campaign in London.
"Since the so-called war against terrorism, the use of torture, particularly in the United States and their sphere of influence... has got so much more normalized as part of national security expectations."
Support for torture ranged widely across nations, from 74 percent in China and India, to just 12 percent in Greece and 15 percent in Argentina, the GlobeScan survey found.
In Britain, which had the lowest fear of torture among all the countries, 29 percent backed its use -- a fact Amnesty country director Kate Allen attributed to the popularity of violent, spy-based TV shows.
"Programs like '24' and 'Homeland' have glorified torture to a generation, but there's a massive difference between a dramatic depiction by screenwriters and its real-life use by government agents in torture chambers," she said.
'They get away with it'
Amnesty won the Nobel Peace prize in 1977 largely because of its work fighting against torture, and the new two-year campaign is an attempt to revisit one of its core issues.
The group notes how the UN Convention made torturers "international outlaws" and prompted governments worldwide to denounce the practice. But it warns that in reality many are endorsing or at least failing to tackle the issue head-on.
It described police brutality in Asia, where torture is a "fact of life", and pointed out that more than 30 countries in Africa have yet to make such abuse punishable by law.
Shetty spoke of "the cruelty of inmates in the United States being held in solitary confinement with no light", of stoning and flogging in the Middle East and of the "stubborn failure" of European nations to investigate allegations of complicity in torture.
The new campaign focuses on five countries where torture is a particular problem and where the NGO believes it can have the most impact: Mexico, the Philippines, Morocco and Western Sahara, Nigeria and Uzbekistan.
Loretta Ann P. Rosales, who was tortured under the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1976 and now leads that country's human rights commission, said there were several reasons why torture continued.
It was seen as a shortcut to get confessions from detainees, a tool of corruption or an instrument of repression, and came from a prioritisation of "the need for state security over human security", she told reporters.
Shetty said in many instances it was simple: "People get away with it."
Amnesty is calling on governments to prevent torture by providing medical and legal access for prisoners and better inspection of detention centres.
But it also wants an end to the impunity that exists in many places, urging independent investigations of allegations of torture.
"Governments have broken their promises, and because of these broken promises millions of people have suffered terribly," Shetty said.
Twitter smacks Ann Coulter down for trolling kidnapped Nigerian girls
Conservative pundit Ann Coulter's attempt to parody the online campaign calling for the release of hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian girls led to her becoming the butt of jokes on Twitter, Talking Points Memo reported.
Coulter posted a picture Sunday night of herself holding up a piece of paper bearing the tag #Bringbackourcountry, a swipe at First Lady Michelle Obama's show of support for the #BringBackOurGirls campaign demanding the rescue of nearly 300 girls taken by the radical group Boko Haram.
My hashtag contribution to world affairs ... pic.twitter.com/Wkb8ozYZFC
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) May 12, 2014In turn, much like the New York City Police Department, Coulter's message was soon seized upon for ridicule:
RT @fullofbalogna "@CletisStump @Kalaax008 What Coulter does for a 'living'. pic.twitter.com/PANPZZYzdt"
— Simon Jones (@SimonsGroove) May 13, 2014@AnnCoulter contributed to the international discussion. She blew it. #BringBackOurGirls #BringBackOurCountry pic.twitter.com/GWstUMfMRU
— Ring of Fire Radio (@ringoffireradio) May 12, 2014Ann Coulter is a Sick Racist and Traitor - Shameful #FlushGOP #StopRush .@PRyan pic.twitter.com/zmWQjBLCEX
— Warp Drive (@jeffwired) May 13, 2014What's Anne Coulter's favorite font? #AnnCoulter @AnnCoulter pic.twitter.com/xHVPTY7tx5
— Jacob (@jacob777k) May 12, 2014Some Twitter users tied Coulter in with other timely topics:
My contribution to the Ann Coulter meme pic.twitter.com/boVVEb8Ean
— TR Slyder (@AndyDisco) May 12, 2014#AnnCoulter confession pic.twitter.com/gQxjVDJ8Sx
— Sarah Meyer (@sarahjeanious) May 12, 2014And others used Coulter's blank canvas to suggest she might be going through more existential dilemmas:
Ann Coulter: pic.twitter.com/18m4khBC0a
— Abeeha (@freddiehamiIton) May 12, 2014Man, sometimes I'm shocked by the shit @AnnCoulter says for attention. pic.twitter.com/m3QnG2ZJhr
— Atchka! (@atchka) May 12, 2014NYC hotel livid after video of elevator scrap between Jay-Z and Beyonce's sister is leaked
A hip New York hotel said Monday it's investigating how surveillance video of Beyonce's sister Solange Knowles attacking brother-in-law Jay-Z in an elevator wound up on an Internet gossip site.
The fuzzy, silent black-and-white video posted on TMZ.com shows Solange kicking and hitting Jay-Z at the Standard hotel, site of an after-party following the glamorous Met Gala in New York on May 5.
A bodyguard is seen trying to restrain the clearly agitated 27-year-old singer, whose 32-year-old megastar sister stood largely in the corner alongside her 44-year-old husband of six years.
The trio can be recognized by the outfits they wore earlier that night at the Metropolitan Museum fashion gala -- Solange in a pink Phillip Lim dress, Beyonce in a sheer black Givenchy Haute Couture gown and Jay-Z in a white tuxedo jacket.
In an email to AFP, the Standard hotel in lower Manhattan expressed outrage that the three and half minute video had gone viral, and it threatened disciplinary and legal action once it finds who made it public.
"We are shocked and disappointed that there was a clear breach of our security system and the confidentiality that we count on providing our guests," it said.
"We are investigating with the utmost urgency the circumstances surrounding the situation and, as is our customary practice, will discipline and prosecute the individuals involved to our fullest capacity."
Neither Solange, Beyonce or Jay-Z mentioned the incident on their respective Twitter feeds Monday, and representatives did not immediately return calls asking for comment.
Solange, whose new album is due out later this year, performed at the Coachella music festival in California last month, where Beyonce joined her on stage, delighting fans.
The Met Gala after-party took place at the Standard's exclusive rooftop Top of the Standard lounge -- better known among New York night owls as "the Boom Boom Room."
The video, as posted online on Monday, can be seen below.
Rupert Murdoch hopes to create pan-European TV giant
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch launched Monday an ambitious bid to create a pan-European television giant to tackle fierce competition, rapid sector consolidation, and aggressive bidding wars for live football rights.
British pay-TV group BSkyB revealed it was in talks to buy holdings in sister firms Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia from Murdoch's 21st Century Fox media conglomerate, which currently owns 39 percent of London-listed BSkyB.
"The company initiated preliminary discussions with 21st Century Fox to evaluate the potential acquisition of its pay-TV assets in Germany and Italy," said a BSkyB statement which gave no indication of price.
It added: "BSkyB believes at the right value, this combination would have the potential to create a world-class multinational pay TV group."
A 21st Century Fox spokesperson said that while it had carried out "numerous internal discussions regarding the organisational and ownership structure of the European Sky-branded satellite platforms ... no agreement between the parties has ever been reached".
Murdoch's 21st Century Fox, which comprises the mogul's film and television assets, currently owns 55 percent of Sky Deutschland and all of Sky Italia.
- BSkyB facing intense competition -
Industry experts say the deal would create a major player with the power to sell services and compete for broadcasting rights across three key European nations, with a total of more than 17 million subscribers.
BSkyB faces intense competition from British telecoms firm BT, which launched its own sports channels last year offering free Premier League football if customers sign up to its broadband Internet package.
BT had outgunned BSkyB in November to secure exclusive rights to televise all Champions League and Europa League football matches in Britain for three seasons from 2015.
The £900-million ($1.4-billion, 1.1-billion-euro) deal will make BT the first UK broadcaster to win exclusive rights to all matches in both European tournaments. Rights to show these matches are currently shared in Britain by Sky and terrestrial channel ITV.
"It’s hard to argue with the view that BT’s successful November bid for the UK broadcasting rights for European football was a real wake-up call for Sky," said equities analyst Daniel Sugarman at trading firm ETX Capital.
"BT has made its mark on the pay-tv football market in the UK in a big, big way.
"That must be on Murdoch’s mind. If BSkyB do manage to take over Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia, a wider European market-base will give them an added element in future negotiations over football broadcasting."
- Murdoch in 'acquisition mode' -
Murdoch's European expansion has also been partly driven by the rapid speed of consolidation in the global telecommunications sector, analysts say.
Earlier this year, British mobile phone group Vodafone bought Spanish cable giant Ono for 7.2 billion euros, having already snapped up Kabel Deutschland, the largest cable operator in Germany, for 7.7 billion euros in 2013.
And US giant Liberty Global took over its British rival Virgin Media last year in a deal worth $23.3 billion.
"Murdoch will be watching the consolidation in the sector closely, and with the TV rights, increased competition should move him into acquisition mode," said Atif Latif, director of trading at Guardian Stockbrokers.
The sector is also fighting competition from Internet streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Monday's announcement comes after Murdoch scrapped a bid to take control of BSkyB in 2011 after a hacking scandal forced the closure of his News of the World tabloid newspaper.
Following the scandal, Australian-born Murdoch split his sprawling media conglomerate into two divisions: film and television maker 21st Century Fox and publisher News Corp.
BSkyB shares finished Monday with a loss of 2.42 percent at 868.5 pence on London's FTSE 100 index, which closed 0.55 percent higher at 6,815.75 points.
Christian broadcaster: Beyoncé's 'Sasha Fierce' persona suggests demonic possession
A religious radio broadcaster who speculated that the hit movie “Frozen” was satanic tool for indoctrinating young lesbians said he believed pop singer Beyoncé Knowles may be possessed by demons.
Kevin Swanson said last week on his Generations Radio program that the singer’s former persona, Sasha Fierce, might have inducted her into Satanism, reported Right Wing Watch.
“That’s multiple personality or that’s demon possession or that’s psychosis -- that's something,” Swanson said. “People used to have to be taken off to insane asylums if they introduced other characters in their lives, these are people who are going to wind up in insane asylums, mental institutes for things like demon possession or psychosis.”
Pop singers such as David Bowie, and Garth Brooks have adopted new personae to signal a shift in style or to generate new interest in their work – but Swanson and American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer have claimed more sinister motives in Knowles’ alter ego.
Swanson also said during the same program that homosexuality was “one of the most devastating sins” because it destroyed family and sexual relationships, although public attitudes have drifted away from his own.
“What’s shifted now, it’s this incredible demonic shift, where what used to be the most devastating, the most horrific thing that could ever happen to a family, has become the highest virtue,” said Swanson, adding that his claims were based on careful study of 1,960 years of homosexual history.
Watch an in-depth examination of Beyoncé and the occult posted online by Daniel Rivera:
Glenn Greenwald: 'I don't trust the UK not to arrest me' over NSA leaks
The dogs can smell Glenn Greenwald long before they see him. As we drive up the hill to his house, a cacophony of barking greets us. The chorus is so overwhelming it makes me think of the National Security Agency (NSA) chiefs who Greenwald has tormented over the past year."They don't bite," Greenwald says as we are engulfed by the pack of strays that he and his partner, David Miranda, have rescued. After a beat, he adds: "… as long as you don't show any fear." I'm not certain he's joking, which is awkward, given that there are 12 of them, ranging from an 80lb Burmese mountain dog to a rat-sized miniature pinscher.
The image of Greenwald and his dogs has been beamed around the world by news organisations since his first NSA revelations were published by the Guardian last year. A writer with a devoted following even before the revelations, he now enjoys more widespread exposure, particularly in the US where his brand of aggressive campaigning journalism has attracted both paeans and condemnation.
But the sight of him surrounded by the animals still comes as a shock. It underlines how dramatically the internet has revolutionised journalism and the nature of the newsroom.
Think of that legendary 1973 photograph of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of Watergate. They are sitting at manual typewriters under neon lights in the Washington Post newsroom. The photo speaks to the power of institutions – that of their newspaper just as much as the White House they were investigating.
Now think of where I'm standing in Glenn Greenwald's retreat, shrouded in jackfruit, banana and lemon trees, where monkeys call in daily and only yesterday a lethal spider the size of a fist was discovered in the bathroom. This is the newsroom of 2014, almost 5,000 miles from Washington DC, the jungle office of the journalist that the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden handpicked to be his conduit to the outside world.
As the anniversary approaches of Greenwald's first Guardian scoop on 5 June 2013, revealing that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans, his life appears to have calmed a bit. He's taking the time to get his fitness back after a stressful period, doing yoga by a stream in the garden and eating calorie-controlled ready meals in an attempt to shed the 12lbs he put on.
It would be rash, though, to describe his working day as ordinary. While I'm at the house he conducts interviews with news organisations in Hungary and Poland; records a video accepting a free-speech award from, incongruously, Hugh Hefner; and tapes a 45-minute address to the University of East London. Soon he will be embarking on a book tour that will take him to the US, then France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain.
There's only one country that has been consciously excluded from the tour – in fact, only one country in the world that Greenwald says he absolutely will not visit. It is the UK. The wounds left by the detention under the Terrorism Act of his partner, Miranda, at Heathrow airport last August, are still open and deep.
Miranda was detained on his way back to Rio on a ticket paid by the Guardian from Berlin, where he had met the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who worked with Greenwald on the NSA files. Officials claimed he was carrying 58,000 classified UK documents on a hard drive.
"I don't trust them not to detain me, interrogate me and even arrest me. Their behaviour has been so extreme and offensive, and the political and media class was so supportive of it, that I feel uncomfortable with the entire atmosphere," says Greenwald.
He insists he has never had animosity towards Britain. "But the more I've learned, the more troubling it has become."
His new book, No Place to Hide, begins with Greenwald's account of how, together with Poitras and the Guardian, he broke what may well be the story of the decade. The funny thing, as he recalls, is how close it came to never happening. This seems a good place to start our conversation when we meet down at sea level in the bustling heart of Rio.
"You truly were crap at encryption," I say, referring to the digital tools that allow you to scramble messages to trusted correspondents to avoid detection, thinking that an adversarial journalist such as Greenwald will appreciate playing hardball.
"I've got a lot better at it, honestly!" he exclaims. He is so imploring in his response that I have immediately to reappraise the man. Such a dichotomy has often been observed about Greenwald: on his Twitter feed and blog, he is a bloody fighter, but in person he is charm itself. When I mention that later, he readily concurs: "People think I'm going to be this, like, monstrous, abusive, heinous asshole to deal with."
But it's true. He wasn't great at encryption. In common with most journalists working today, he had no clue about tools that would have allowed him to communicate with sources privately, without fear of NSA or any other snooping.
When Snowden first contacted Greenwald in December 2012, using the pseudonym Cincinnatus and exhorting him to employ PGP encryption channels through which they could talk securely, Greenwald read the email but failed to reply. "There was nothing in the email that I found sufficiently enticing," he writes.
Seven weeks went by – seven! – but Snowden kept coming back, pleading with him to set up basic systems so they could chat freely. Here was Greenwald being offered one of the biggest national-security leaks in US history, and for months he did nothing about it. "There must have been some surveillance or journalism god watching over me," he says, "because I did everything I could to blow it."
A large part of the book is devoted to Greenwald's exposition of why the NSA story matters. He writes cleanly and surprisingly fluently for a journalist known for the density of his prose about the threat of mass surveillance, and the need for privacy.
"It's not an easy argument to make," he says. "The privacy argument is pitted against the much more instinctive and visceral danger: that you and your children are going to be blown up by terrorists. Human beings are driven by fear, and you can't ignore that in pursuit of some abstract principle."
He tries in the book to make that principle concrete, showing how privacy is an essential feature of any free society, because it's where we experiment, take risks, do silly things, explore the boundaries of ourselves.
To his delight, one of the best examples of that phenomenon is displayed by the NSA itself. Greenwald reprints in the book an NSA slide from Snowden's documents that, when he first saw it, almost made him laugh because it is so surreal. Titled "New Collection Posture", it sets out the scale of the NSA's ambitions in astonishingly frank terms: "Sniff it all, Know it all, Collect it all, Process it all, Exploit it all, Partner it all."
"The NSA wrote that slide because they believed they were doing this in total secrecy – that nobody was watching them," Greenwald says, his face lighting up with excitement. "They were speaking in ways that no public official would ever speak if they thought they were being overheard. It's precisely why privacy is so important."
None of that answers, for me, a key puzzle about the NSA story: why him? Why is he the one to feel so passionately about a subject that until Snowden came along was considered by most people to be rather obscure, chipping away at it relentlessly since he started his blog in 2005?
There is nothing in his background to suggest he would turn into a scourge of overweening state power. The son of a housewife and a Republican-leaning accountant, brought up in nondescript central Florida, he might have been expected, as he puts it himself, to become a "corporate lawyer in a big city somewhere". So what happened?
"Honestly, the thing that saved me was being gay. My gayness made me very combative, assertive and an outsider. I'm always thankful for that."
As we're driving up the hill to his home, his voice drops. "I remember this constant struggle, from age eight to 12, feeling there was this thing inside me, like a sickness that was permeating my entire being, that I had to keep completely secret. It felt like something had gone wrong in the universe: it wasn't supposed to happen to me, it was supposed to happen to other people. It was this constant sense of alienation, that I had to hide my real self because it was bad or sick."
And then, he says: "You get to this point where you think that's fucked up, that there is a completely invalid judgment being imposed on you, and that's when you go to war about it."
The Greenwald that we know – that the NSA and GCHQ detest – was born.
I want to lighten the tone after that, so as the car winds its way up the hill giving us breathtaking views over the city, I decide on a whim to take a leaf out of MP Keith Vaz's notorious question to Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger at the home affairs select committee meeting investigating the impact of the NSA revelations. "Mr Greenwald," I say. "Do you love America?"
He gets the joke, but still replies: "To me America is a set of political principles and values enshrined in the founding documents. I'm a huge admirer of those political values."
"Now you're sounding like a member of the Tea Party," I say.
"But I do. I do have really high regard for those values. I hate the way my government so frequently violates them."
For someone who refuses to be pigeon-holed with any label – left or right, progressive or conservative; the only description he remotely accepts is "civil libertarian" and even that grudgingly – his evocation of the US founding fathers is revealing. And not because of the Tea Party. It points to a central paradox of Greenwald – that the man lambasted by his detractors as an anti-American and traitor is actually as American as they come.
Part of his American-ness is that he puts his faith not in traditions or institutions, but in individuals and in himself. That's why the internet for him is so vital; it transfers power from that Washington Post newsroom to his own jungle office. You can see that thinking behind his decision to quit the Guardian and create his own journalistic enterprise, the Intercept.
The move was audacious and bold, but when I raise it with him he's in a surprisingly reflective mood. He's had some feelings, if not of regret, then perhaps of a little guilt at having left the Guardian at a time when the NSA disclosures were still blazing. "I don't want to say betrayal, that's too strong, but a lack of loyalty …"
The Intercept is being bankrolled by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder. Was it wise to leave the Guardian, an organ with no owner, run by a trust, in order to embrace a billionaire tech tycoon waving a $250m cheque? And was it, given his scathing critique of big business, true to his own values?
"Maybe my judgment was a bit impaired. I didn't predict how people would see it. Pierre's not just a funder. He's the 100th-richest person in the world. He has $9bn, which is an unfathomable sum, and he's from the very tech industry that is implicated in the NSA story. I probably paid insufficient attention to those perceptions."
Perceptions? Isn't there a problem also with independence?
No, says Greenwald firmly. "I know in my mind that the minute anybody tries to interfere with what I'm doing, that is the minute I will stop doing it."
There has been a groundswell of grumbling that the Intercept has failed to deliver on its promise of more NSA surprises. Why are things moving so slowly?
"Putting together a new media organisation is more difficult than I'd anticipated," he concedes. "Which makes sense, as I've never done it before. To me it was just: give me a fucking website and stand out the way."
It's clear that the road ahead for Greenwald following the NSA leaks is not entirely paved with gold. Sure, the benefits have been huge: worldwide fame, wall-to-wall TV interviews, accolades, soaring fees on the speaker circuit, not to mention the film rights currently being finalised with Sony (he won't discuss who he wants to play him in the movie, saying: "I completely don't give a shit, genuinely.")
Has there also been a toll, a price to pay, for what he has been through? You can't take on some of the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not feel the pressure, even if you do live in a jungle paradise.
The moment his vulnerability hit home for him was when Miranda was being grilled that fateful day in Heathrow. Being Glenn Greenwald, his instinct was to scream and yell from the rooftops, but he was strongly advised to maintain his silence.
"I couldn't do anything about it. So I just went to the store and bought all this junk food, and I binged on Doritos. I gave myself permission to gorge myself. That's when you realise what power is. They had taken this person I love most in the world and had put him in a locked room, and could easily have arrested him and put him in a cage. The helplessness of that. That's the first time I felt vulnerable, because I felt like I had no control."
The person who supported him most that long and difficult day was Snowden. They spent all day in communication, Greenwald frantic at his desk in his jungle office, Snowden just two weeks into his new-found asylum in Russia. It was an extraordinary, and poignant, role reversal: the source comforting the journalist.
"When he heard David was detained, Snowden was so enraged and concerned, which shocked me," Greenwald says. "His own situation was very uncertain at the time – he's facing 30, 40 years in prison if he ever comes back to the US, and yet he was supportive of what I was going through. That's when I realised we were bonded in an eternal way to the same cause, which most journalists don't like to admit, but I have no trouble admitting – we work to the same ends. We have a bond, a human bond."
Bond or no bond, it strikes me as interesting that in the book, as in conversation, Greenwald only refers to his interlocutor as "Snowden", never by his first name. What's that about?
"It's the weirdest thing. I cannot call him Ed. For the longest time we referred to him as 'the source'. And then when I met him, I never used his name. It just rings false to call him Ed."
Greenwald is not Snowden's keeper, and nor is he responsible for the decision to leak the documents. But it's still stark, the diverging fortunes of these two men, given their shared objectives. Greenwald has been showered with riches and opportunities; Snowden faces years in exile or in custody.
"I am cognisant of that," Greenwald says, sounding uncharacteristically stilted. "He's the one who made the greatest sacrifice, and I've gotten all these material and visibility benefits. So I try every single day to think about how to use them in a way that fulfills and advances what he wanted to achieve. I recognize my debt to him."
Before I leave I ask one last question as the darkness is thickening over the jackfruit and the dogs are quietly slouched in heaps all over the veranda. What would victory, an endgame, look like to Glenn Greenwald?
"The inability of any one country to exert hegemony over the internet, as the US does now," he says. "But the bigger picture for me will be getting people to think about these issues in a different way. And not just surveillance and privacy. Myth and reality, propaganda, the role of journalism – these are questions that are being debated in a much more significant way. The change in public consciousness – that's going to be the biggest victory."
• No Place to Hide, by Glenn Greenwald is published on 13 May 2014 by Hamish Hamilton
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