Snowden ally Glenn Greenwald joins eBay's Pierre Omidyar's new venture
Journalist who revealed whistle-blower's NSA secrets joins eBay billionaire's new venture
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who revealed key details about the US National Security Agency's massive surveillance programme, is leaving Britain's The Guardian newspaper to join a venture backed by the eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.
The new, as-yet-unnamed news site has also sought to hire Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who was instrumental in linking former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to Greenwald and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.
I was presented with a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline
Another potential hire was Jeremy Scahill, national security reporter of The Nation magazine, said a source.
Snowden, now in temporary exile in Russia, supplied Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman with classified material detailing the extent of the NSA's monitoring of electronic communications in the US and abroad and co-operation by British agencies.
Omidyar, who grew up in the Washington area, founded eBay in 1995 and became a billionaire two years later with its initial public stock offering. Forbes estimated his net worth was US$8.5 billion in September.
He has been involved in funding journalism projects before, including Backfence, a defunct network of "hyper-local" news sites in the Washington area, and Honolulu Civil Beat, a three-year-old site that carries investigative reports about Hawaii.