David Miranda, a Brazilian gay rights activist and former lawmaker who assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified US documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, died May 9 in a Rio de Rio hospital janeiro. he was 37
Greenwald announced the death, which occurred one day before Mr. Miranda’s 38th birthday. After being hospitalized with a serious gastrointestinal infection in August, Mr Miranda spent nine months in intensive care, Greenwald said, where he battled further infections but occasionally recovered. No immediate cause of death was reported.
The son of a prostitute, Mr. Miranda grew up with a neighbor in a very poor neighborhood in Rio. He rose to fame as a pioneering gay politician and bitter opponent of right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022. Mr Miranda was included in Time magazine’s 100 “Next Generation Leaders” in 2019 for his open support for Brazil’s poorest and most most marginalized communities.
Mr Miranda, who met Greenwald on Rio’s Ipanema Beach in 2005, entered politics in 2016 when he became, by all reports, the first openly gay man to be elected to Rio’s city council. Two years later he ran for the Federal Parliament with the Socialism and Freedom Party, known by its Portuguese initials PSOL.
Mr Miranda lost the 2018 election but won a seat the following year after MP Jean Wyllys, another openly gay member of PSOL, left the country after receiving death threats. Mr. Miranda was elected to fill his seat.
“Obviously I fear for my life or what might happen to my family,” Mr. Miranda said in a 2019 radio interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., “but in moments like these you have to be brave.” People need a voice. “
Before entering politics, Mr Miranda gained international attention for carrying computer files related to documents leaked by Snowden, a computer intelligence adviser whose employer worked with the National Security Agency.
In 2013, Snowden had leaked a wealth of classified material to Greenwald and Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker based in Germany. The revelations also included details of surveillance by the NSA and other agencies.
A few months later Mr. Miranda was recruited by Greenwald to ship a USB stick from Poitras back to Brazil. During a stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport, Mr Miranda was arrested under Britain’s Anti-Terrorism Act and held for nine hours.
“I was sure that I would go to Guantánamo forever,” he later said. But he made it to Rio and sued the British government for violating his rights as a journalist. A British tribunal ruled in 2014 that Mr Miranda’s detention was lawful, although it constituted “an indirect interference with freedom of the press”. (Snowden did not return to the United States for fear of arrest and was granted Russian citizenship in 2022.)
“Journalism is not a crime,” Greenwald said after his husband’s incarceration, “and it is not terrorism.”
Mr. Miranda and Greenwald met in 2005 when Miranda, then a Manhattan attorney, went to Brazil for a two-month vacation. On the beach, Mr. Miranda was playing volleyball and accidentally knocked over Greenwald’s drink. He apologized at length in Portuguese.
Mr. Miranda and Greenwald went out to dinner that night and began living together less than a week later. Their attraction to each other, Greenwald later told the New York Times, was like “the collision of two asteroids,” and they soon married.
“I didn’t speak much English,” Mr Miranda told Out magazine in 2011, “and he only knew a few words of Portuguese, but we communicated everything that was important. When you meet the right person, you know.”
In order to remain in Brazil with Mr. Miranda, Greenwald had to resign from law practice. He took up blogging, first for Salon and then for the Guardian. He developed a subsequent article on the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their impact on civil liberties in his homeland. Greenwald’s plays caught Snowden’s attention years before the leaks.
In 2014, The Washington Post and The Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Merit for a series of articles exposing the NSA’s worldwide surveillance programs. The project’s lead journalists – Barton Gellman of the Post and Greenwald of the Guardian – based their articles on Snowden’s revelations.
“Of all those involved in the global mass surveillance revelations of 2013, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous – and pure,” Snowden tweeted after learning of Mr Miranda’s death. Snowden wrote that Mr Miranda “never let up” when questioned by British authorities.
David Michael dos Santos Miranda was born on May 10, 1985 to a prostitute in Jacarezinho, one of the poorest districts in Rio. He never met his father and his mother died when he was 5 years old.
Mr. Miranda grew up with a neighbor but went into business for himself at the age of 13. To make ends meet, he would shine shoes, clean buildings, and sometimes rummage through garbage cans for food. Later, with Greenwald’s encouragement, Mr. Miranda graduated from a Rio school with a marketing degree in 2014.
Mr Miranda’s involvement in the Snowden revelations inspired him to enter politics, initially unsuccessfully appealing to Brazilian authorities to grant Snowden asylum. A year after his election in Rio, he was elected to the city council by Marielle Franco, a black woman with a partner and a child.
She has become a mentor and “a mother figure,” Mr. Miranda said. Their joint initiatives included a law allowing transgender people to use their preferred name on government documents.
“Fighting for the LGBT community,” he said, “is at the core of my bones and blood.”
In 2018, Franco was fatally shot while being driven home after giving a speech. Mr Miranda told Out magazine that he believed it was a targeted assassination. (Two former police officers were later arrested for the crime and are awaiting trial.)
“They could have pretended it was a robbery,” Mr Miranda said, “but they didn’t care. They wanted to send a message.” Mr Miranda said that being the pallbearer at Franco’s funeral “may have been the hardest moment of my life”.
After Franco’s death, Mr. Miranda, Greenwald and their two adopted children traveled in armored glass cars. Mr. Miranda canceled some appointments for security reasons.
In the federal legislature, Mr. Miranda led efforts to create hate crime legislation to protect LGBTQ+ communities. He also worked on investigative projects with Greenwald, who left the Guardian in 2014 and helped found a news site called Intercept. (Greenwald resigned from Intercept in 2020.)
Mr Miranda helped Greenwald with a 2019 story that quoted hacked cellphone conversations between prosecutors and a judge overseeing a corruption case against former left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose imprisonment paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory. (Da Silva, commonly known as Lula, returned in 2022 to defeat Bolsonaro and win back the presidency.)
The bombshell made Mr Miranda and Greenwald targets for Bolsonaro, who had already described himself as a “proud homophobe”, and his supporters. In 2020, Greenwald was charged with “cybercrime” by the Bolsonaro government. The case was later dismissed by a judge who said Greenwald “instigated” hacking but was protected by freedom of the press.
In addition to Greenwald, the survivors include their sons João and Jonathan.
In July 2019, The Times reported that Mr Miranda lives alone in the capital Brasília and is plagued by “loneliness and alienation”. However, he served his term and planned to stand for re-election in 2022. His candidacy was withdrawn in October while he was hospitalized.
“Fighting for justice is necessary, an obligation,” Mr. Miranda wrote in 2018, “although it is always risky.”