Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday slammed both Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, the newspaper columnist who first disclosed the leaks by the former National Security Agency subcontractor on the U.S. government's vast surveillance programs.
“As far as Greenwald is concerned, he’s an ideologue," Dershowitz told CNN in an interview. "I don’t think he would have revealed this information if it had been critical of Venezuela or Cuba or the Palestinian Authority."
The professor was responding to comments by Greenwald on a new video in which Snowden said
that government surveillance has destroyed individual privacy.
Dershowitz's comments were
first reported by BuzzFeed.
As a columnist for The Guardian in London, Greenwald disclosed information in June year that Snowden had stolen while working for the NSA about its massive daily collection of telephone and Internet data on millions of Americans.
Snowden, 30, is now living under temporary political asylum in Russia. Greenwald is now working on an online mass media venture with ebay founder Pierre Omidyar.
"You know, he doesn’t like America," Dershowitz said of Greenwald, 46, who was born in Queens, N.Y. "He doesn’t like Western democracies. He’s never met a terrorist he didn’t like.
"So he’s a very hard-left ideologue that uses this to serve his political agenda not simply to reveal information in a neutral way," he added. "That makes him very different from WikiLeaks, I think."
In response, Greenwald said on Twitter: "Alan Dershowitz excels at discrediting himself."