The Intercept

Website funded by billionaire and deep state operative Pierre Omidyar. Secured control over the documents from Edward Snowden, for then to publish a minuscule percentage of them and hide the rest forever. Has a tendency to reveal whistleblowers.

 https://theintercept.com/    
Started: 2014
Founders: Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Pierre Omidyar

Owner: First Look Media
Constitutes: Website,  gatekeeper,  honey trap?

Members: Matthew Cole,  Richard Esposito,  Betsy Reed,  Roger D. Hodge,  am Biddle,  David Bralow,  Rodrigo Brandão,  Thomas Crowley,  Ryan Devereaux,  Lee Fang,  Lauren Feeney,  Laura Flynn,  Vanessa Gezari,  Ali Gharib,  Ryan Grim,  Akil Harris,  Philipp Hubert,  Murtaza Hussain,  Mara Hvistendahl,  Andrea Jones,  Ken Klippenstein,  Rashmee Kumar,  Akela Lacy,  Micah Lee,  Peter Maass,  Miroslav Macala,  Robert Mackey,  Travis Mannon,  Schuyler Mitchell,  Leandro Oliva,  José Olivares,  Nausicaa Renner,  James Risen,  Alyxaundria Sanford,  Jon Schwarz,  Liliana Segura,  Michael Sherrard,  Nara Shin,  Jordan Smith,  Alice Speri

The Intercept is a website which publishes some of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. It was founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill and funded by eBay billionaire and deep state operative Pierre Omidyar. FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds asserts Pierre Omidyar decided to create The Intercept to not only take ownership of the Snowden leaks but also to continue his blockade against WikiLeaks and create a honey trap for whistleblowers.

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou in an email to Whitney Webb stated:

I am appalled that yet another whistleblower in touch with The Intercept has been outed and arrested. The Intercept has a track record on whistleblowers that it should be ashamed of. Reality Winner was in touch with The Intercept and was arrested and charged with espionage. Terry Albury apparently was in touch with The Intercept and was arrested and charged with espionage. I was arrested and charged with espionage after being in touch with Matthew Cole, now an Intercept reporter. If The Intercept cannot or will not protect the identity of its sources, it should not be in the business of journalism. Indeed, perhaps The Intercept should walk away from national security reporting before its lack of journalistic professionalism ruins any more lives.

Official narrative

The Intercept was the first publication of First Look Media, the journalistic platform created and financed by the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar. The latter indicated that he would invest 250 million dollars (183 million euros) in this project which should allow journalists to "continue the quest for the truth"

The Intercept pursues two missions. In the short term, the magazine was to serve as a platform to present the documents on the NSA revealed by Edward Snowden and thus continue the publication of investigations into global surveillance by the United States. In the longer term, The Intercept aimed to develop a mainstream medium for the practice of "brave, combative" investigative journalism, and addressing broader issues: abuse, financial and political corruption, or violation of civil liberties.

In October 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 corruption of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter with regard toChina and the Ukraine.

In November 2022, it was reported that The Intercept received grant funds from Sam Bankman-Fried—founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX—Bankman-Fried was reported to have given funds mostly to left-leaning causes or media.

NSA malware

In March 2014, The Intercept published leaked documents from Edward Snowden showing that the National Security Agency was building a system which could infect millions of computers around the world with malware. 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. The story reportedly prompted Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to phone President Obama and complain about the NSA's surveillance]]. 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."

NSA intercepts

In May 2014, The Intercept reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) 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. Following the report, The Intercept was criticised by WikiLeaks for withholding the name of one country whose calls were being recorded. WikiLeaks announced that "the country in question is Afghanistan."

Revealing whistleblowers

In 2017, Reality Leigh Winner, a 26-year-old federal contractor, was arrested for allegedly leaking a classified NSA document to The Intercept that was related to an investigation of an alleged Russian military intelligence hacking operation targeting the U.S. While The Intercept maintained that it was unaware that Winner was the source of the document, FBI documents showed that negligence helped lead federal investigators straight to Winner.The Intercept’s scanned images of the intelligence report that Winner leaked contained tracking dots – a type of watermark – that, according to Rob Graham of the Errata Security blog, showed "exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed." These dots make it easy to identify a printer’s serial number as well as the date and time a document was printed. As Graham noted, “Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document."

Whitney Webb writes that:

In addition, and perhaps most concerning of all, the FBI warrant also notes that the reporter in question – who is unnamed in the document – contacted a government contractor with whom he had a prior relationship and revealed where the documents had been postmarked from – Winner’s home of Augusta, Georgia – along with Winner’s work location. He also sent unedited images of the documents that contained the tracking dot security markings that allowed the document to be traced to Winner. While the identity of the reporter mentioned in the FBI warrant remains unknown, the published report that used the document leaked by Winner has four authors – two of whom, Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito, were once involved in a case against CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

In 2018, former Minneapolis-based FBI agent Terry James Albury was charged with leaking classified government information to The Intercept. Information contained in the complaint against Albury suggested that The Intercept was responsible for outing Albury as a confidential source. According to the FBI, The Intercept made two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in March 2016. Both of those requests contained specific information identifying the names of the documents that were not publicly available. FBI search warrants show that these FOIA requests led the FBI to link references contained in the requests to Albury’s activity on FBI information systems.

COVID-19

The Jimmy Dore Show: Science Denying Intercept Reporter Doxxes Ivermectin Truth-Teller

Double Standard

The Intercept shows a double standard towards sources, with an underlying assumption that everything the US govt. says is true, and anything a foreign govt. says is false.

For example, it thinks that when US State Dept. funds biolabs in Ukraine, they could only be for civilian purposes but when the NIH --- a civilian health organisation, with no military ties --- funds research in Wuhan, it created COVID-19 because a "white supremacist" said so .

US academic, Jeffrey Kaye, debunks Intercept propaganda:

When I examined the documents and claims, I found that five of the twenty bioagents listed in the document, and referenced many times by those, like Mackey, debunking Russia’s biowarfare research claims, were actually serious pathogens. These included Category B bioterrorism threats, including Shigella (which causes dysentery) and Salmonella (which in the strain held by the Ukraine lab, causes serious gastroenteritis).

Five, and arguably six, of the others bioagents were considered disease-causing and a threat to laboratory workers.

Shigella species, in particular, were used by Japan’s Unit 731 in field trials in China during World War II. So they have a long history of use in biological warfare, and hardly constitute “relatively harmless” organisms.

While a few of the bioagents were, as Mackey and his sources alleged, typical lab agents used for research purposes, such as Staphlococcus aureus ATCC 25923 and E. Coli B, other pathogens presented dangers of their own. One example is Proteus mirabilis, which can cause serious infections in humans, including bacteremia, wound infections, sepsis and pneumonia.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Cryptome	“Cryptome raises serious questions that nobody else on the left or in the media want to talk about, including how Omidar has created a business from Snowden's cache; what exactly Snowden may have been doing while he was working for the CIA prior to his time at NSA (and what else he may have been doing at NSA itself); and why Snowden and The Intercept continue to proselytize for Tor, the anonymization tool, despite its massive funding from the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the national security state.”	Tim Shorrock	February 2016
Pierre Omidyar	“There is truly nothing like Omidyar’s contradictory roles — fighting the empire, leaking the empire’s secrets, while also working hand-in-glove with the empire’s agencies to make the world more pliable to US government and corporate interests. Perhaps it reflects the multibillionaire’s bizarre Howard Hughes-like schizophrenia; perhaps it’s deliberate, a co-optation of the dissident activist wing. Perhaps there’s no rhyme or reason, only the effects — an eerie silence from nearly the entire activist community when it comes to holding Omidyar or his many endeavors accountable.”	Pierre Omidyar Mark Ames	30 October 2014

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End
Andy Carvin	Editor In Chief of Reported.ly	February 2014	August 2016

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Pierre Omidyar: giving until it hurts	article	7 December 2013	David Carr	"No billionaire media mogul is ever going to be in the service of working people, no matter how much rhetoric about freedom of speech is deployed in the promotion of his or her product..."

 

A document sourced from The Intercept

Title	Type	Subject(s)	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:GCHQ and Me: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers	Article	GCHQ UKUSA SIGINT Edward Snowden ECHELON Robert Hannigan ABC Trial Transparency International Menwith Hill Reiner Braun	3 August 2015	Duncan Campbell	No one at the May 2015 conference on intelligence, security and privacy argued against greater openness. Thanks to Edward Snowden and those who courageously came before, the need for public accountability and review has become unassailable.

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