The Intercept

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The Intercept
The Intercept 2015 Logo.png
Intercept screenshot.PNG
Type of site
 News website
Available in English and Portuguese
Owner First Look Media
Editors Betsy Reed, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill[1]
Website theintercept.com
Alexa rank Increase 6,334 (December 2016)[2]
Commercial Yes
Launched February 2014
Photo by Trevor Paglen of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade first published in The Intercept

The Intercept is an online publication launched in February 2014 by First Look Media, the news organization created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.[3] The editors are Betsy Reed, Glenn Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill;[1] former editor Laura Poitras moved to Field of Vision, a First Look Media project focused on non-fiction films.[4]

The magazine serves as a platform to report on the documents released by Edward Snowden in the short term, and to "produce aggressive, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues" in the long term.[5]

Aims and content[edit]

At launch, the editors announced:[5]

"A primary function of The Intercept is to insist upon and defend our press freedoms from those who wish to infringe them. We are determined to move forward with what we believe is essential reporting in the public interest and with a commitment to the ideal that a truly free and independent press is a vital component of any healthy democratic society. […] Our focus in this very initial stage will be overwhelmingly on the NSA story. We will use all forms of digital media for our reporting. We will publish original source documents on which our reporting is based. We will have reporters in Washington covering reactions to these revelations and the ongoing reform efforts. We will provide commentary from our journalists, including the return of Glenn Greenwald's regular column. We will engage with our readers in the comment section. We will host outside experts to write op-eds and contribute news items.

Our longer-term mission is to provide aggressive and independent adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues, from secrecy, criminal and civil justice abuses and civil liberties violations to media conduct, societal inequality and all forms of financial and political corruption. The editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed, and they will be encouraged to pursue their journalistic passion, areas of interest, and unique voices.

We believe the prime value of journalism is that it imposes transparency, and thus accountability, on those who wield the greatest governmental and corporate power. Our journalists will be not only permitted, but encouraged, to pursue stories without regard to whom they might alienate."

In a press release announcing his hiring as editor-in-chief, John Cook stated "I am thrilled to be able to help them build a truly great outlet for the sort of aggressive, muckraking reporting that they embody."[6]

Major stories and reaction[edit]

Their first published story was an in-depth report about the NSA's involvement in the U.S. targeted killing program, which detailed the flawed methods which are used to locate targets for lethal drone strikes, resulting in the deaths of innocent people.[7] This was followed by an article containing new aerial photographs of the NSA, NRO, and NGA headquarters.[8]

In March 2014, The Intercept published leaked documents from Edward Snowden showing that the National Security Agency was building a system to infect potentially millions of computers around the world with malware.[9] The report included a top-secret NSA animation showing how the agency disguised itself as a Facebook server in order to hack into computers for surveillance.[10] The story reportedly prompted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to phone President Obama and complain about the NSA's surveillance.[11] Zuckerberg later wrote in a blog post: "I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future."[12]

In May 2014, The Intercept reported that the National Security Agency was secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas and collecting cell phone metadata in Mexico, the Philippines and Kenya.[13] Following the report, The Intercept was criticized by WikiLeaks for withholding the name of one country whose calls were being recorded.[14] WikiLeaks announced that the "The country in question is Afghanistan."[15]

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.[16] 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.[17] The watchlist reports prompted intelligence official to consider requesting a criminal investigation into The Intercept's sources.[18] In October 2014, it was reported that the FBI had raided the home of the suspected source in northern Virginia, outside Washington D.C.[19]

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 (Belgium's largest telecom).[20]

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." [21]

In September 2015, The Intercept disclosed dozens of top-secret British intelligence documents, which revealed that spy agency GCHQ 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. [22]

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."[23] 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.” [24] 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.”[25] 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.”[26]

In December 2015, The Intercept published a secret U.S. government catalogue showing dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military, intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States. [27]

Awards[edit]

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.[28] In April 2016, The Intercept won the People's Voice award for best news website at the 10th annual Webby Awards.[29] In May 2016, The Intercept won three awards at the 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.[30] 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.[31][32]

US government reaction[edit]

On August 15, 2014, U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive (NCE) 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. [33] "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.[34]

In August 2014, The Intercept revealed that members of the US military are banned from reading it.[35]

Criticism[edit]

Erik Wemple, writing for The Washington Post, noted the conspicuous refusal of The Intercept to use the term "targeted killings" to refer to the U.S.'s drone program, instead referring to the drone strikes as "assassinations". Wemple included Greenwald's explanation that assassinations 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."[36] TechCrunch referred to the story as clear evidence of "unabashed opposition to security hawks".[37]

In May 2014, journalist Ed Pilkington of The Guardian asked Greenwald whether it had been "wise to leave The Guardian, an organ with no owner, run by a trust, in order to embrace a billionaire tech tycoon waving a $250m cheque? And was it, given his scathing critique of big business, true to his own values?" "Maybe my judgment was a bit impaired", Greenwald reflected. "I didn't predict how people would see it. Pierre [Omidyar]'s not just a funder. He's the 100th-richest person in the world. He has $9bn, which is an unfathomable sum, and he's from the very tech industry that is implicated in the NSA story. I probably paid insufficient attention to those perceptions." Greenwald nevertheless insisted that he and The Intercept remain editorially independent of Omidyar. "I know in my mind that the minute anybody tries to interfere with what I'm doing, that is the minute I will stop doing it."[38]

In February 2015, having resigned after nearly 14 months, Ken Silverstein contributed an article on Politico about his time at First Look and The Intercept. "I went to First Look to do fearless journalism," Silverstein wrote, "but I found I couldn't navigate any journalism, fearless or not, through the layers of what I saw as inept management, oversight and editing."[39]

Juan Thompson scandal[edit]

In February 2016, the site appended lengthy corrections to five stories by reporter Juan 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."[40]

The site's investigation into Thompson's reporting had found that he had, on multiple occasions, attributed quotes to people who said he had not interviewed them or did not remember him doing so, people whom they could not reach to verify the quote or whose identity could not be confirmed.[40] In the retracted story, Roof's family said they did not know of a cousin whom Thompson had quoted as saying Roof's interest in white supremacy took off after a woman to whom he was attracted began dating a black man.[41] He also used "quotes that we cannot verify from unnamed people whom he claimed to have encountered at public events." To prevent his fabrications from being discovered, she continued, he lied to editors about how he had gotten the quotes, and in one case created an email account in the name of one of his sources. When editors discovered his actions, she added, he stood by his published work and, while admitting to creating the email accounts, refused to assist in the review otherwise.[40]

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.[40] After the note was published, the site amended Thompson's online biography when an editor at a Chicago public radio station said that while Thompson had indeed worked there, he had no involvement in the station's news reporting as he had claimed. His past tenure at DNAinfo in Chicago, where one editor tweeted in response to the story that she could have seen it coming, was also edited out.[42]

In an email to Reed he shared with various news outlets, Thompson said he was being treated for testicular cancer and for that reason had not had access to his notes when the site had asked to review them. He explained his methods as "writing drafts of stories, placing the names of [people] I wanted to get quotes from in there, and then going to fetch the quotes .. If I couldn't obtain a quote from the person I wanted, I went somewhere else, and must've forgot to change the names—clearly." While he admitted this was "sloppy", he faulted The Intercept for lacking "a sustained and competent editor to guide me," alluding to the site's managerial turnovers.[42]

He 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. "[T]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.[42]

He was fired by The Intercept in early 2016, and according to Reed, did not cooperate into the investigation of his actions.[43]

Branches[edit]

There is a Brazilian version of The Intercept edited in Portuguese, aiming local politics news made by a local journalist team and also with translated news from the English edition.[44][45]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "About The Intercept". About. The Intercept. Retrieved February 10, 2014. 
  2. ^ "theintercept.com Site Overview". Alexa Internet. Retrieved December 12, 2016. 
  3. ^ Russell, Jon (February 10, 2014). "The Intercept, the first online publication from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, is now live". The Next Web. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  4. ^ Poitras, Laura (September 20, 2016). "Field of Vision Is Moving". The Intercept. Retrieved January 12, 2017. 
  5. ^ a b Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill (February 10, 2014). "Welcome to The Intercept". The Intercept. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  6. ^ Staff (March 11, 2014). "John Cook leaves Gawker to become editor-in-chief for The Intercept" (Press release). New York, New York: Talking New Media. Retrieved November 22, 2014. 
  7. ^ Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald (February 10, 2014). "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program". The Intercept. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  8. ^ Trevor Paglen (February 10, 2014). "New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for First Time". The Intercept. Retrieved February 10, 2014. 
  9. ^ Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald (March 12, 2014). "How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions' of Computers with Malware". The Intercept. Retrieved June 6, 2014. 
  10. ^ The Intercept (March 12, 2014). "Video: How the NSA Secretly Masqueraded as Facebook to Hack Computers for Surveillance". The Intercept. Retrieved June 6, 2014. 
  11. ^ Alex Byers (March 13, 2014). "Mark Zuckerberg calls Obama after NSA report". Politico. Retrieved June 6, 2014. 
  12. ^ Mark Zuckerberg (March 13, 2014). "Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post". Politico. Retrieved June 6, 2014. 
  13. ^ Devereaux, Ryan; Greenwald, Glenn; Poitras, Laura (May 19, 2014). "Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas". The Intercept. Retrieved May 20, 2014. 
  14. ^ Nicks, Denver (May 20, 2014). "WikiLeaks Threatens To Reveal Unnamed Country From Snowden Documents". Time. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  15. ^ Wikileaks (May 23, 2014) Tweet by Wikileaks Twitter; retrieved 2014-05-23
  16. ^ Scahill, Jeremy; Devereaux, Ryan (July 23, 2014). "The secret government rulebook for labeling you a terrorist". The Intercept. Retrieved Feb 7, 2017. 
  17. ^ Scahill, Jeremy; Devereaux, Ryan (August 5, 2014). "Barack Obama's secret terrorist tracking system, by the numbers". The Intercept. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  18. ^ Mark Hosenball (August 5, 2014). "U.S. intelligence officials looking into suspected new spy leak". Reuters. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  19. ^ Raf Sanchez (October 28, 2014). "FBI 'raids home of suspected Snowden copycat'". The Telegraph. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  20. ^ Gallagher, Ryan (December 13, 2014). "Operation Socialist The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium's Largest Telco". The Intercept. Retrieved January 12, 2015. 
  21. ^ Jeremy Scahill (April 17, 2015). "Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America's Drone War". The Intercept. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  22. ^ Ryan Gallagher (September 25, 2015). "From radio to porn, British spies track users' online identities". The Intercept. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  23. ^ Intercept staff (October 16, 2015). "The Drone Papers". The Intercept. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  24. ^ Tom McCarthy (October 16, 2015). "Snowden and Ellsberg hail leak of drone documents from new whistleblower". The Guardian. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  25. ^ Tom McCarthy (October 16, 2015). "Snowden and Ellsberg hail leak of drone documents from new whistleblower". The Guardian. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  26. ^ Tom McCarthy (October 16, 2015). "Snowden and Ellsberg hail leak of drone documents from new whistleblower". The Guardian. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  27. ^ Scahill, Jeremy; Williams, Margot (December 17, 2015). "A Secret Catalogue of Government Gear for Spying on your Cellphone". The Intercept. Retrieved February 7, 2017. 
  28. ^ "2016 National Magazine Awards". American Society of Magazine Editors. Retrieved January 15, 2017. 
  29. ^ Spangler, Todd. "Webby Awards 2016 Winners: Netflix, HBO, the Onion, Tyler Oakley, Michelle Obama Pick Up Awards". Variety. Retrieved January 15, 2017. 
  30. ^ "2016 Journalism Awards Winners" (PDF). NY Press Club. Retrieved January 15, 2017. 
  31. ^ "The Intercept and the Orlando Sentinel Win 2016 ONA Investigative Data Journalism Awards". University of Florida. Retrieved January 15, 2017. 
  32. ^ "Breaking News, Intercept, Quartz, New York Magazine take home 2016 Online Journalism Awards". Journalists.org. Retrieved January 15, 2017. 
  33. ^ The Intercept (August 5, 2014), firstlook.org; accessed December 7, 2015.
  34. ^ Clark, Charles S. (August 15, 2014). "Meet the Man Who's Gauging the Damage From Snowden". Government Executive. Retrieved August 18, 2014. 
  35. ^ Gilbert, David (August 21, 2014). "US Military Banned From Reading Glenn Greenwald's New Website". International Business Times UK. Retrieved August 21, 2014. 
  36. ^ Wemple, Erik (February 10, 2014). "Glenn Greenwald and the U.S. 'assassination' program". Washington Post. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  37. ^ Ferenstein, Gregory (February 10, 2014). "eBay Founder's News Site, The Intercept, Launches With NSA Revelations". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved December 7, 2015. 
  38. ^ Pilkington, Ed (May 11, 2014). "Glenn Greenwald: 'I don't trust the UK not to arrest me. Their behaviour has been extreme'". The Guardian. Retrieved May 12, 2014. 
  39. ^ Silverstein, Ken. "Where Journalism Goes to Die". Politico. Retrieved March 2, 2015. 
  40. ^ a b c d Reed, Betsy (February 2, 2016). "A Note to Readers". The Intercept. Retrieved February 4, 2016. 
  41. ^ Thompson, Juan (June 18, 2015). "Dylan Roof's Cousin Claims Love Interest Chose Black Man Over Him.". The Intercept. Retrieved February 4, 2016. 
  42. ^ a b c Trotter, J.K. (February 2, 2016). "Reporter Fabricated Quotes, Invented Sources at The Intercept". Gawker. Retrieved February 4, 2016. 
  43. ^ Wong, Julia Carrie (February 2, 2016). "The Intercept admits reporter fabricated stories and quotes". The Guardian. Retrieved December 17, 2016. 
  44. ^ "The Intercept Brasil" (in Portuguese). Retrieved Nov 19, 2016. 
  45. ^ "About & Contacts - The Intercept" (in Portuguese). Retrieved Nov 19, 2016. 

External links[edit]

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