The Intercept has published in English since its founding in 2014, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition staffed by a local team of Brazilian journalists.
History
The Intercept was founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras.[4] It was launched on 10 February 2014 by First Look Media with funding by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar,[5][6] starting with $250 million in pledged funding.[7] The publication initially reported on documents released by Edward Snowden.[8] Co-founders Greenwald and Poitras left in 2020 amid public disagreements about the leadership and direction of the organization.[4] In January 2023 it spun off from the First Look Institute as an independent nonprofit organization.[9]
The website had hosted an archive of documents leaked by Snowden to Greenwald and Poitras. First Look deprecated the archive and laid off its associated research team in 2019, saying that their editorial priorities had changed and that they no longer reported from the archive. This marked the end of The Intercept's original vision of being a platform to report on the NSA disclosures.[10]Barrett Brown burned the National Magazine Award he had received for his Intercept column in protest of First Look's decision to offline the Snowden archives.[11]
In February 2024, The Intercept laid off 16 staff members, one-third of its newsroom.[12][13] In April 2024, the outlet fired William Arkin and Ken Klippenstein resigned in protest.[14] In July 2024, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim left The Intercept to found their own news website, Drop Site News.[15]The Intercept stated it was providing startup funding for the new site, that Scahill left with the support of the outlet, and that Scahill would continue participating in podcasts.[16]
Finances
At launch, Omidyar pledged $250 million in funding.[7] The non-profit arm of First Look Media budgeted $26 million in both 2017 and 2018, according to public filings, much allocated to The Intercept.[7] Top journalists received top dollar, with Greenwald being paid $500,000 in 2015.[7]
The Intercept was awarded a grant of $3.25 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It had only received $500,000 when Bankman-Fried went bankrupt and the shortfall in funding "will leave The Intercept with a significant hole in its budget" according to its editor-in-chief.[17]
Omidyar ceased financial support in 2022.[18] First Look Media offered a $14 million grant when The Intercept spun off. In 2023, the CEO discussed a financial pivot to small donors and major gifts. Donations doubled from $488,000 to $876,000 from 2022 to 2023, but failed to meet expenses. As of April 2024, The Intercept was burning around $300,000 a month.[18]
The Intercept Brasil
In August 2016, The Intercept launched a Brazilian version, The Intercept Brasil, edited in Portuguese, aimed at Brazilian political news, and produced by a team of Brazilian journalists. The Intercept Brasil also features translated news from the English edition.[19]
In June 2019, The Intercept Brasil released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between judge Sergio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and other Operation Car Wash prosecutors.[20][21] In the wake of the reporting, the Brazilian government in January 2020 indicted Glenn Greenwald on cybercrimes charges in connection with his efforts to protect his sources, the legitimacy of President Jair Bolsonaro's election was called into question, and the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in April–June 2021 annulled former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 2018 conviction on corruption charges.[22][23]
Intercepted is a weekly podcast hosted by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and produced by First Look Media.[24] 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 featured 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.[25]
The premiere 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".[26]
Deconstructed
Deconstructed is a podcast hosted by The Intercept's Washington, D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim. The show was previously hosted by British political journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan for its first two years, from 2018 to 2020. Grim took over as permanent host in October 2020 when Hasan began hosting a news broadcast for Peacock.[27][28]
Murderville, GA
Murderville, GA is hosted by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith, who cover a series of murders in a small Georgia town and the law enforcement investigation surrounding them.
Somebody
Somebody is a podcast about a gunshot victim, Courtney Copeland, found outside a Chicago Police station, and the controversy around the official narrative.
American ISIS
American ISIS is a podcast hosted by journalist Trevor Aaronson about the life of Russell Dennison, an American convert to Islam who fought and died for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Aaronson interviewed Dennison in secret for the last two years of the latter's life.[29]
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.[30] In April 2016, The Intercept won the People's Voice award for best news website at the twentieth annual Webby Awards.[31] 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.[32] 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.[33][34]
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.[35] 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.[36] The news organization also won a 2017 award for "Outstanding Feature Story" at the sixteenth annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.[37] 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".[37]
Reception
In August 2014, it was reported that members of the U.S. military had been banned from reading The Intercept.[38][39][40][41]
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. drone program, instead referring to the drone strikes as "assassinations." Wemple included Glenn 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".[42]TechCrunch referred to the story as clear evidence of "unabashed opposition to security hawks".[43]
In February 2016, the site appended lengthy corrections to five stories by reporter Juan M. Thompson and retracted a sixth, about Charleston church shooterDylann 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".[44]
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.[44]
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. "[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 said 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.[45]
He was fired by The Intercept in early 2016 and, according to Reed, did not cooperate with the investigation into his actions.[46]
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.[47] 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.[48] The article bolstered public suspicion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The document states 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 stated 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, "[a]n 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."[49] NSA quickly identified the leaker of the documents.[50]
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.[51][52]
According to the FBI, 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.[53]The Intercept has been criticized for unprofessional handling of the document, and indifference to the source's safety.[54][55]
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".[56]
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.[57][58]
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."[59]
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.[60] Winner was being held at the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP)'s Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, in order to receive treatment for bulimia and be close to her family.[60]
On November 30, 2020, Laura Poitras, one of the founding editors of The Intercept, left the company. She said she was fired in relation to the Winner controversy.[61][62]
Resignation of Glenn Greenwald
On October29, 2020, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, saying that he faced political censorship and contractual breaches from the editors, who he wrote had prevented him from reporting on the conduct of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, with regard to China and Ukraine.[63] On The Joe Rogan Experience, Greenwald stated that he thinks his colleagues did not want to report anything negative about Joe Biden because they were desperate for Trump to lose.[64]The Intercept disputed Greenwald's accusations, writing that he "believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor", and told The Washington Post, "it is absolutely not true that Glenn Greenwald was asked to remove all sections critical of Joe Biden from his article. He was asked to support his claims and innuendo about corrupt actions by Joe Biden with evidence."[65][66]
Walter Haskell Pincus is an American national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.
Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer.
Jeremy Scahill is an American activist, author, and investigative journalist. He is a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007), which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013) was adapted into a documentary film which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In July 2024, he left The Intercept and, together with Ryan Grim and Nausicaa Renner, founded Drop Site News.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is a non-profit organization founded in 2012 to fund and support free speech and freedom of the press. The organization originally managed crowd-funding campaigns for independent journalistic organizations, but now pursues technical projects to support journalists' digital security and conducts legal advocacy for journalists.
Boundless Informant is a big data analysis and data visualization tool used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). It gives NSA managers summaries of the NSA's worldwide data collection activities by counting metadata. The existence of this tool was disclosed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, who worked at the NSA for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Those disclosed documents were in a direct contradiction to the NSA's assurance to United States Congress that it does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans.
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
XKeyscore is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.
During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
First Look Media is an American nonprofit media organization founded by Pierre Omidyar in October 2013 as a venue for "original, independent journalism". The project was started as a collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras with a promised $250 million in funding from Omidyar. The organization announced plans to support multiple publications, the first of which was The Intercept, launched in February 2014.
Global surveillance and journalism is a subject covering journalism or reporting of governmental espionage, which gained worldwide attention after the Global surveillance disclosures of 2013 that resulted from Edward Snowden's leaks. Since 2013, many leaks have emerged from different government departments in the US, which confirm that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on US citizens and foreign enemies alike. Journalists were attacked for publishing the leaks and were regarded in the same light as the whistleblowers who gave them the information. Subsequently, the US government made arrests, raising concerns about the freedom of the press.
This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in 2013. The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from the former American National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
MYSTIC is a former secret program used since 2009 by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect the metadata as well as the content of phone calls from several countries. The program was first revealed in March 2014, based upon documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its US premiere on October 10, 2014, at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014, at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour received critical acclaim upon release, and was the recipient of numerous accolades, including Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. This film is the third part to a 9/11 trilogy following My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010).
Ryan Gallagher is a Scottish investigative journalist. He writes about security and civil liberties for Bloomberg News, and previously worked for The Intercept reporting on classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He has previously worked for The Intercept, The Guardian, Slate, and the Financial Times.
Betsy Reed is an American journalist and editor. From January 2015, she was the editor-in-chief of The Intercept. In July 2022, she was named the editor-in-chief of Guardian US, succeeding John Mulholland, and assumed her new position in the autumn of that year.
Reality Leigh Winner is an American U.S. Air Force veteran and former NSA translator. In 2018, she was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. She was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison.
David Michael dos Santos Miranda was a Brazilian politician. He was a Federal Congressman representing the state of Rio de Janeiro, serving from 2019 until 2023, and was affiliated with the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), after switching parties from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) in 2022. Prior to that, he was a City Councilman representing the city of Rio de Janeiro. Miranda also played a key role in Edward Snowden's global surveillance leaks.
Vaza Jato, roughly meaning Car Wash Leaks, is the term used by the Brazilian press for leaked conversations in the Telegram app about the actions, decisions and positions of officials conducting investigations for Operation Car Wash. These officials include former judge Sergio Moro and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol. The conversations were reported by the journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept Brasil and by Brazilian conservative magazine Veja in June 2019.
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