Greenwald’s really working hard to revive his failing story.

Greenwald Claims Private Contractors Can Spy on Calls, Emails: ‘I Defy NSA Officials to Deny’ These Capabilities | Mediaite

Following up on Edward Snowden’s earlier claim that he could wiretap anybody as a low-level defense contractor—a claim denied by NSA officials and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers—Glenn Greenwald appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and claimed that his forthcoming reporting would prove exactly that.

“It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool,” Greenwald said of the program Snowden used, “exactly the type that Mr. Snowden described. NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I’ve just said.”

Greenwald described the capabilities of the program, accessible not just by NSA officials but by low-level private contractors:

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and email in their databases. 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 connected to that IP address do in the future. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst.”

Greenwald noted that while “there are legal constraints on how you can spy on Americans,” there’s nothing stopping, or even detecting, abuse of the program.

Note that Greenwald ADMITS it’s illegal for the NSA to use these programs to spy on Americans - but insinuates that they’re doing it anyway. And unless all the information we’ve gotten to date is wrong, he’s simply lying again when he says they can “listen to calls.”