The Intercept
The Intercept is an online news publication of First Look Media, owned by Pierre Omidyar. Its editors are Betsy Reed, Glenn Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill. It also publishes two podcasts, Intercepted hosted by Scahill and Deconstructed hosted by Mehdi Hasan.
The Intercept has published in English since its founding, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition staffed by a local team of Brazilian journalists.
History
The Intercept was launched in February 2014, by First Look Media, which is funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The publication initially reported on documents released by Edward Snowden.Major stories and reaction
The Intercept first published story was a report about the U.S National Security Agency's involvement in the U.S. targeted killing program. The article discussed the methods the NSA used to locate targets for lethal drone strikes. This was followed by an article containing new aerial photographs of the NSA, NRO, and NGA headquarters.In March 2014, The Intercept published leaked documents from Edward Snowden showing that the National Security Agency was building a system to infect computers in various countries with malware. The report alleged that the NSA spoofed a Facebook server in order to hack into computers for surveillance. According to Politico, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later complained to President Obama about NSA's surveillance.
In July 2014, The Intercept obtained leaked documents revealing that the Obama administration approved a major expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that required neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist. In August 2014, The Intercept reported that nearly half of the people on the U.S. government's widely shared database of terrorist suspects were not connected to any known terrorist group. The watchlist reports prompted intelligence officials to consider requesting a criminal investigation into The Intercept sources. In October 2014, it was reported that the FBI had raided the home of the suspected source in northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C.
In December 2014, The Intercept published new leaked documents from Edward Snowden showing that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind an attack, codenamed Operation Socialist, on Belgacom's systems. The attack was described by Snowden as the "first documented example to show one EU member state mounting a cyber attack on another".
In April 2015, The Intercept reported in collaboration with Der Spiegel that a U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany, serves as the "high-tech heart" of America's drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other targeted countries. The Intercept cited a top-secret document and a confidential source, who said that "Ramstein carries the signal to tell the drone what to do and it returns the display of what the drone sees. Without Ramstein, drones could not function, at least not as they do now."
In September 2015, The Intercept disclosed dozens of top-secret British intelligence documents, which revealed that spy agency Government Communications Headquarters was trying to build a surveillance system to monitor "every visible user on the internet". It reported that GCHQ was developing new techniques to perform "population-scale" data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious.
In October 2015, The Intercept published the Drone Papers, a series of stories based on a cache of leaked secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The news site said that the documents were "provided by a whistleblower" and offered "an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars". The revelations were praised by Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, and NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, who said: "When we look back on today, we will find the most important national security story of the year." Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, described the Drone Papers reports as "pretty remarkable stuff". He added: "In some ways it reconfirms and illuminates much of what we knew, or thought we knew, about a lot of these programs, like that the administration firmly prefers kill over capture despite claiming the opposite, and that there's not 'a bunch of folks in the room', as Obama calls it – that there's a clear, bureaucratic process for this. It clearly shows, as we've known, that the United States does not know who it's killing." The White House and National Security Council declined to comment, saying in a statement that it does not "comment on the details of classified reports".
In November 2016, The Intercept revealed that a windowless skyscraper in New York City's Lower Manhattan, owned by AT&T, hosts a secret National Security Agency surveillance site "that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data".
On January 10, 2017, The Intercept reported that members of the elite U.S. military unit SEAL Team Six had allegedly committed war crimes, including mutilations of corpses and an attempted beheading. Senior command staff were aware of the misconduct, but did little to stop it, and in some cases helped to cover up the wrongdoing, according to the report.
On January 31, 2017, The Intercept published leaked documents from the FBI, revealing that the bureau can use "national security letters" to spy on journalists without the previously necessary step of obtaining permission from a judge. Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the rules were "incredibly weak and almost nonexistent". The documents also showed that the FBI uses the threat of deportation to turn immigrants into confidential informants.
In June 2017, The Intercept released a top-secret document leaked from NSA, which revealed information about hacking efforts by Russian military intelligence against several U.S. state and local government agencies during the 2016 United States elections.
Awards
In February 2016, The Intercept won a National Magazine Award for columns and commentary by the writer Barrett Brown, and it was a finalist in the public interest category for a series by Sharon Lerner called the Teflon Toxin, which exposed how DuPont harmed the public and its workers with toxic chemicals. In April 2016, The Intercept won the People's Voice award for best news website at the twentieth annual Webby Awards. In May 2016, The Intercept won three awards at the New York Press Club Awards For Journalism. The site was awarded in the "special event reporting" category for its investigative reporting on the U.S. drone program, the "humor" category for a series of columns by the writer Barrett Brown, and the "documentary" category for a short film called, "The Surrender"—about the former U.S. intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim—produced by Stephen Maing, Laura Poitras, and Peter Maass. At the September 2016 Online News Awards, The Intercept won the University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism for its Drone Papers series, an investigation of secret documents detailing a covert U.S. military overseas assassination program.At the 2017 Online News Awards, The Intercept won two awards: the first for a feature story about the FBI's efforts to infiltrate the Bundy family, and the second, an investigative data journalism award for "Trial and Terror", a project documenting the people prosecuted in the U.S. for terrorism since 9/11. The same year, The Intercept won a Hillman Prize for Web Journalism for an investigative series by Jamie Kalven exposing criminality within the Chicago Police Department. The news organization also won a 2017 award for "Outstanding Feature Story" at the sixteenth annual Awards for Reporting on The Environment. Judges of the environmental award praised author Sharon Lerner for her piece "The Strange Case of Tennie White", which they described as a "finely written and disturbing investigation of contamination and injustice near a chemical plant in Mississippi".
U.S. government reaction
On August 15, 2014, U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive William Evanina confirmed that the FBI is moving forward with a probe into how classified documents were leaked to The Intercept for its article revealing details about a database of terrorism suspects, which linked some people to terrorism even if they had no known association with any terrorism group. "It's a criminal act that has us very concerned," said Evanina, a former FBI special agent with a counter-terrorism specialty who was appointed NCE by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in May 2014.In August 2014, it was reported that members of the U.S. military had been banned from reading The Intercept.
Controversies
, writing for The Washington Post, noted the conspicuous refusal of The Intercept to use the term "targeted killings" to refer to the U.S. drone program, instead referring to the drone strikes as "assassinations". Wemple included Greenwald's explanation that assassination is "the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the government wants us to use"; Greenwald further noted that "anyone who is murdered deliberately away from a battlefield for political purposes is being assassinated". TechCrunch referred to the story as clear evidence of "unabashed opposition to security hawks".Jewish Telegraph Agency wrote that The Intercepts founder "has relentlessly criticized Israel and its political leadership, and at times has invoked tropes of dual loyalty in attacking the pro-Israel community". The site also published a podcast titled "The case against AIPAC". Politico described the website as "the loudest voice attacking Democrats from the left".
Juan M. Thompson scandal
In February 2016, the site appended lengthy corrections to five stories by reporter Juan M. Thompson and retracted a sixth, about Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, written over the previous year, focused on the African-American community. Shortly afterward, a note from editor Betsy Reed indicated that Thompson had been fired recently after his editors discovered "a pattern of deception" in his reporting. According to Reed, he had "fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in my name".Reed apologized to readers and to those misquoted. She noted that some of Thompson's work, most of it using public sources, was verifiable. Editors alerted any downstream users of the affected stories, and promised to take similar action if further fabrication came to light.
Thompson suggested that the greater problem was racism in the media field. He had made up pseudonyms for some of his sources, whom he described as "poor black people who didn't want their names in the public given the situations" and would not have spoken with a reporter otherwise. "he journalism that covers the experiences of poor black folk and the journalism others, such as you and First Look, are used to differs drastically," he argued. He also claimed he had felt a need to "exaggerate my personal shit in order to prove my worth" at The Intercept given incidents of racial bias he said he had witnessed there. When Gawker published his email, Reed said those allegations had not been in the version he sent her.
He was fired by The Intercept in early 2016 and, according to Reed, did not cooperate with the investigation into his actions.
Exposure and arrest of a confidential source
In early June 2017, The Intercept published a National Security Agency document that asserts Russian intelligence successfully hacked an American voter registration and poll software company, and used information culled to phish state election officials. The document was mailed from a source inside NSA, who did not reveal their identity to Intercept writers. One hour after publication, Reality Winner, a 25-year old NSA contract employee, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.The article bolstered public suspicion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It also drew attention for being at odds with views held by editor Glenn Greenwald who had publicly ridiculed or dismissed allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, calling them "radical conspiracy theories". Greenwald alleged in a Democracy Now! interview that the Democratic party hyperbolized the evidence supporting collusion complaints about Trump, in order to shift the blame for Trump's election as president away from the Democratic Party.
The document explains that Russian intelligence attempted to crack the log-in information of the employees of a vendor providing voter registration software and databases for states to use with their election systems. It alleged that the Russians were successful enough that they were able to email 122 election officials, by posing as employees of the vendor.
According to David Folkenflik of National Public Radio,
An Intercept reporter shared a photo of the papers with a source, a government contractor whom he trusted, seeking to validate it. The printout included a postmark of Augusta, Ga., and microdots, a kind of computerized fingerprint. The contractor told his bosses, who informed the FBI.NSA quickly identified the leaker of the documents.
Verifying the legitimacy of leaked documents is common journalism practice, as is protecting third parties who may be harmed incidentally by the leak being published. However, professional media outlets who receive documents or recordings from confidential sources do not, as a practice, share the unfiltered primary evidence with a federal agency for review or verification, as it is known that metadata and unique identifiers may be revealed that were not obvious to the journalist, and the source exposed.
The evidence chain led to the arrest of Winner, a young Air Force veteran who was working in Georgia for Pluribus International Corporation, an NSA contractor, when the document was mailed to The Intercept. The Intercept has been criticized for unprofessional handling of the document, and indifference to the source's safety.
Following the arrest of Winner, The Intercept released a statement saying it had "no knowledge of the identity of the person who provided us with the document". Allegations from the FBI about Winner, it added, were "unproven assertions and speculation designed to serve the government's agenda and as such warrant skepticism".
NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou and Guantanamo Bay detention camp whistleblower Joseph Hickman have both accused the same reporter accused of revealing Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, of playing a role in their exposure, which, in Kiriakou's case, led to his imprisonment.
On July 11, 2017, The Intercept announced that its parent company, First Look Media, through its Press Freedom Defense Fund, would provide $50,000 in matching funds to Stand with Reality, a crowd-funding campaign to support Winner's legal defense, plus a separate grant to engage a second law firm to assist Winner's principal attorneys, Augusta-based Bell & Brigham. Additionally, wrote editor-in-chief Betsy Reed, "First Look's counsel Baruch Weiss of the firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer may support the defense efforts while continuing to represent First Look's interests."
On August 23, 2018, at a federal court in Georgia, Winner was sentenced to the agreed-upon five years and three months in prison for violating the Espionage Act. Prosecutors said her sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media. Winner is being held at the Federal Bureau of Prisons 's Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, in order to receive treatment for bulimia and be close to her family.
Podcasts
''Intercepted''
Intercepted is a weekly podcast hosted by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and produced by First Look Media. The podcast uses interviews, round table discussions, and journalistic narrative to present investigative reporting, analysis, and commentary on topics such as war, national security, the media, the environment, criminal justice, government, and politics. Launched on January 25, 2017, the show often includes discussion with other writers, reporters, artists, and thinkers. It regularly features The Intercept editor and journalist Glenn Greenwald as well as senior correspondent, author, and journalist Naomi Klein. The editor-in-chief is Betsy Reed. Music for the show is created and performed by DJ Spooky.The premier episode, on January 25, 2017, "The Clock Strikes Thirteen, Donald Trump is President" features an interview with Seymour Hersh, who criticizes the media's response to the alleged Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling the way the media went along with the story, "outrageous". Other notable guests on the show include Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Barbara Lee.