America is so over those NSA leaks, says former NSA director Michael Hayden

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

Last year, journalist Glenn Greenwald, with the help of Edward Snowden, broke the news of the NSA's sprawling spy ops. Yet just one year later, with Greenwald now heading a new muckraking magazine, The Intercept, Politico asks if America is bored with him and his leaks.

To support the hypothesis, Politico spoke with former NSA chief Michael Hayden, who had a major hand in shaping the organization Greenwald exposed. His take:

"I think there's a bit of Snowden fatigue out there right now," said former NSA director Michael Hayden, who points to the public's less-than-inflamed response to Greenwald's recent revelation that the NSA under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) monitored five prominent Muslim-Americans whose names appeared among 7,485 email addresses examined between 2002 and 2008. Greenwald "thought that FISA thing was going to be a grand finale for the fireworks display, but frankly it didn't bounce very much," said Hayden. [Politico]

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.

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