Glenn Greenwald

The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided. That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent.

Three updates on the holding of David Mirands, Glenn Greenwald's partner. David Miranda was told 'They said I would be put in jail if I didn't cooperate'. And, it turns out the White House was given 'heads-up' over David Miranda detention in UK but claims it was not something they requested and was a decision of British authorities. Finally, journalists, human rights lawyers and civil liberties campaigners condemn Miranda's nine-hour detention at Heathrow and members of Parliament are demanding an explanation and looking at revising the terrorism law used to hold Miranda.

Glenn Greenwald - the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs - claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans. "The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they've collected over the last several years," Greenwald told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

A congressional hearing next Wednesday on the National Security Agency's surveillance efforts will include testimony from critics, including the journalist who first reported on the programs. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) told The Guardian that he's working with other lawmakers to spearhead the hearing in order to rebut "constant misleading information" from the intelligence community. It will not be a formal hearing, but will feature rougly a dozen lawmakers from both parties. Grayson said that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, who reported on the surveillance programs based on information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has been invited to participate in the hearing via video conference from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.