Edward Snowden reporting and archives In its early years,
The Intercept published extensive investigations on the
Snowden disclosures' revelations about surveillance activity in the U.S. and globally. Five months later,
The Intercept shared details on
ICREACH, the NSA's search engine giving access to hundreds of millions of records about both American citizens and non-Americans to 23 U.S. governmental agencies, including the
CIA and
FBI. In July 2014,
The Intercept reported how the British spy agency
Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) was covertly manipulating internet content and activity with tactics like artificially increasing website traffic and interfering with online polls.
The Intercept also alleged that GCHQ used
Regin malware in
cyberattacks on
Belgacom and other EU computer systems. In February 2015,
The Intercept reported that the NSA and GCHQ had hacked French-Dutch digital security company
Gemalto in order to surveil calls and data secretly, an apparent violation of international law. A follow-up in June 2015 detailed how GCHQ's
Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group worked to discredit specific targets online through the use of impersonation, fake websites, YouTube videos, and other tools. A story in September 2015 covered
Karma Police, GCHQ's surveillance program established seven years earlier to record the search, browsing, and chat activities of every internet user with the goal of identifying patterns and relationships rather than targeting specific users.
The Intercept 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 original vision of being a platform to report on the NSA disclosures.
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.
Podcasts Intercepted Intercepted was a weekly
podcast hosted by
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and produced by
First Look Media.
Intercepted was launched on January 25, 2017. It regularly featured
The Intercept editor and journalist
Glenn Greenwald as well as senior correspondent, author, and journalist
Naomi Klein. The editor-in-chief was
Betsy Reed. Music for the show was created and performed by
DJ Spooky. The last episode was July 3, 2024. It was replaced by
The Intercept Briefing. The premiere episode, on January 25, 2017, "The Clock Strikes Thirteen, Donald Trump is President" featured 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".
Deconstructed Deconstructed is a podcast hosted by
The Intercepts 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.
The Intercept Brasil In August 2016,
The Intercept launched a Brazilian version,
The Intercept Brasil. In June 2019,
The Intercept Brasil released
leaked Telegram messages exchanged between judge
Sergio Moro, prosecutor
Deltan Dallagnol and other
Operation Car Wash prosecutors. In the wake of the reporting, the Brazilian government in January 2020 indicted Glenn Greenwald on
cybercrime 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.
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. He was fired by
The Intercept in early 2016 and, according to Reed, did not cooperate with the investigation into his actions.
Reality Winner controversy In early June 2017,
The Intercept published a
National Security Agency document that asserted that Russian intelligence had successfully hacked an American voter registration and poll software company and used information culled from it to
phish state election officials. The document was mailed from a source inside the 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 had interfered in the 2016 election. The document stated that Russian intelligence had 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." 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. 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.
The Intercept was 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 both accused Matthew Cole, the same reporter accused of revealing Winner's identity, 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, editor-in-chief Betsy Reed said that "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 was held at the
Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP)'s
Federal Medical Center, Carswell in
Fort Worth, Texas, to receive treatment for
bulimia and be close to her family.
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 publication of his "The Real Scandal: U.S. Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter's Emails" article on coverage of
the Hunter Biden laptop controversy; Greenwald pivoted to
Substack to publish it independently. 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.
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." Greenwald published his email exchange with
The Intercept, which, he said, showed his article on Joe Biden was censored. ==Finances==