Journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain spoke to HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski on Wednesday about their new story, which revealed that the NSA and the FBI spied on Muslim-American public figures.
Greenwald worked with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to publish revelations about the NSA's domestic surveillance program last year, and has promised that there are more revelations to come. He and Hussain reported that the U.S. government has monitored the emails of five prominent Muslim-Americans, who were named in the piece.
Speaking on HuffPost Live, Greenwald said that it was necessary to identify the five men in order to "put a human face on what this surveillance is about and the way in which people are targeted and affected."
The government insisted that the reporters not publish the names, he said, but they chose to do so because "it's so clearly in the public interest."
Greenwald added that the five individuals — two of whom also spoke to HuffPost Live — had no "conceivable relationship" to terrorism. "The US government owes its citizens some answers about why people like this have been targeted, who have never been arrested who have never been charged who have certainly never been convicted of any crimes," he said.
He also explained why the story, which had been scheduled to go live earlier, was delayed. "The reason we held the story back...was a last-minute factual claim that arose about one of the statements in our story," Greenwald said. "We took a week to investigate whether the story was 100 percent accurate."
Since his bombshell piece for the Guardian last year, Greenwald also reported that the NSA spied on the leaders of Brazil and Mexico. He and other journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post recently won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for their NSA reporting.