Articles by The Intercept
We found 610 results.
What’s Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
23 Mar 2015
But the comical futility of these efforts is exceeded by their profound dangers. Who wants governments to be able to unilaterally block websites? Isn’t the exercise of this website-blocking power what has long been cited as reasons we should regard the Bad Countries — such as China and Iran — as tyrannies (which also usually cite “counterterrorism” to justify their censorship efforts)?
→ read full articleUS Threatened Germany over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
23 Mar 2015
19 Mar 2015 – German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country.
→ read full articleThe Orwellian Re-Branding of “Mass Surveillance” as Merely “Bulk Collection”
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
16 Mar 2015
Just as Bush administration and U.S. media re-labelled “torture” with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now re-branding “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal).
→ read full articleNew Zealand Used NSA System to Target Officials, Anti-Corruption Campaigner
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
16 Mar 2015
14 Mar 2015 – Kiwi spies programmed XKEYSCORE to intercept documents mentioning top Solomon Islands officials and a campaigner who publishes government leaks.
→ read full articleNew Zealand Targets Trade Partners, Hacks Computers in Spy Operations
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
16 Mar 2015
10 Mar 2015 – New Zealand is conducting covert surveillance operations against some of its strongest trading partners and has obtained sophisticated malware to infect targeted computers and steal data, newly released documents reveal.
→ read full articleThe CIA Campaign to Steal Apple’s Secrets
Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley – The Intercept,
16 Mar 2015
10 Mar 2015 – Researchers working with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleCIA Director Describes How the U.S. Outsources Terror Interrogations
Cora Currier – The Intercept,
16 Mar 2015
Brennan’s remarks confirm what journalists have long reported: that the Obama administration sometimes helps other countries do the dirty work of snatching and interrogating terror suspects-keeping the U.S. at arm’s length from operations that are ethically and legally dubious.
→ read full articleThe “Snowden is Ready to Come Home!” Story: A Case Study in Typical Media Deceit
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
9 Mar 2015
What rational person would ever willingly submit themselves to a penal state that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world, run by people with this mentality?
→ read full articleDocuments Shine Light on Shadowy New Zealand Surveillance Base
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
9 Mar 2015
Secret files from Edward Snowden reveal how NSA spying tools are being used by its New Zealand counterpart, the GCSB, to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails across the Asia-Pacific — news that has come as a shock to the region, where political leaders have denounced the surveillance as a “mass invasion of privacy” and a “breach of trust.”
→ read full articleClapper Calls for Arming Ukrainian Forces: Who Would That Actually Empower?
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
2 Mar 2015
The U.S. has already provided “non-lethal” aid to Ukrainian forces, and Obama has said he is now considering arming them. Who, exactly, would that empower? Russian President Vladimir Putin has long said that the Ukrainian coup of last year, and the subsequent regime in Kiev, is driven by ultra-nationalists, fascists, and even neo-Nazi factions.
→ read full articleGemalto Doesn’t Know What It Doesn’t Know
Jeremy Scahill – The Intercept,
2 Mar 2015
25 Feb 2015 – Gemalto, the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, launched an internal investigation after The Intercept six days ago revealed that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ hacked the company and cyberstalked its employees. In the secret documents, provided by Edward Snowden, the intelligence agencies described a successful effort to obtain secret encryption keys used to protect hundreds of millions of mobile devices across the globe.
→ read full articleThousands Join Legal Fight against UK Surveillance — And You Can, Too
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
On Monday [16 Feb 2015], London-based human rights group Privacy International launched an initiative enabling anyone across the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the National Security Agency’s British counterpart.
→ read full articleThe Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
19 Feb 2015 – American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
→ read full articleResearchers Find ‘Astonishing’ Malware Linked to NSA Spying
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
17 Feb 2015 – Security researchers have uncovered highly sophisticated malware that is linked to a secret National Security Agency hacking operation exposed by The Intercept last year.
→ read full articleThe Atlantic Ignores Muslim Intellectuals, Defines “True Islam” As ISIS
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
In the piece, author Graeme Wood makes the case that the militant group represents a highly authentic version of Islam. Far from being an aberrant or deviant offshoot of traditional Islamic beliefs, it is described as being a faithful expression of them — representing “a coherent and even learned expression of Islam.”
→ read full articleEuropean Lawmakers Demand Answers on Phone Key Theft
Ryan Devereaux and Cora Currier – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
20 Feb 2015 – European officials are demanding answers and investigations into a joint U.S. and U.K. hack of the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile SIM cards, following a report published by The Intercept [on TMS] Thursday [19 Feb 2015].
→ read full articleHailed as a Model for Successful Intervention, Libya Proves to Be the Exact Opposite
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
Since 2011, Libya has rapidly unraveled in much the way Iraq did following that invasion: swamped by militia rule, factional warfare, economic devastation, and complete lawlessness. And to their eternal shame, most self-proclaimed “humanitarians” who advocated the Libya intervention completely ignored the country once the fun parts — the war victory dances and mocking of war opponents — were over.
→ read full articleThe Intercept’s Laura Poitras Wins Academy Award for ‘Citizenfour’
Peter Maass – The Intercept,
23 Feb 2015
“The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed don’t only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself,” Poitras said in her acceptance speech. “Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage and for the many other whistleblowers.” Snowden, in a statement released after the award was announced, said, “My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.”
→ read full articleOscars Make History, So Hollywood’s War Stories Need to Be True
Peter Maass – The Intercept,
16 Feb 2015
Cultural critics like to tell us that movies are just movies, but the “calm down it’s just a movie” attitude is chiefly used to protect narratives — like Zero Dark Thirty or American Sniper — that confirm our prejudices.
→ read full articleIs Your Child a Terrorist? U.S. Government Questionnaire Rates Families at Risk for Extremism
Murtaza Hussain, Cora Currier, and Jana Winter – The Intercept,
16 Feb 2015
Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleWestern Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
9 Feb 2015
4 Feb 2015 – The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.
→ read full articleBurning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
9 Feb 2015
4 Feb 2015 – The latest ISIS atrocity – releasing a video of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive – prompted substantial discussion yesterday about this particular form of savagery. It is thus worth noting that deliberately burning people to death is achievable – and deliberately achieved – in all sorts of other ways:
→ read full articleIn Historic Ruling, UK Surveillance Secrecy Declared Unlawful
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
9 Feb 2015
The United Kingdom’s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday [6 Feb 2015].
→ read full articleSami Al-Arian, Professor Who Defeated Controversial Terrorism Charges, Is Deported from U.S.
Murtaza Hussain and Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
9 Feb 2015
5 Feb 2015 – In 2003, Sami Al-Arian was a professor at the University of South Florida, a legal resident of the U.S. since 1975, and one of the most prominent Palestinian civil rights activists in the U.S. The government ultimately failed to produce any evidence of Al-Arian’s involvement in terrorist activities and his ordeal finally ended last night, 12 years after it began, as Al-Arian was deported to Turkey. “I came to the United States for freedom, but four decades later, I am leaving to gain my freedom.”
→ read full articleHow Guantánamo Diary Escaped the Black Hole and Got Past the Censors (Mostly)
Cora Currier – The Intercept,
2 Feb 2015
31 Jan 2015 – The first word of Guantánamo Diary is a black bar. The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.
→ read full articleCanada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads
Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
2 Feb 2015
The covert operation, revealed Wednesday [28 Jan 2015] by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.
→ read full articleTorture If You Must, But Do Not Under Any Circumstances Call the New York Times
Dan Froomkin – The Intercept,
2 Feb 2015
Monday’s [26 Jan 2015] guilty verdict in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on espionage charges — for talking to a newspaper reporter — is the latest milepost on the dark and dismal path Barack Obama has traveled since his inaugural promises to usher in a “new era of openness.”
→ read full articleHow to Leak to The Intercept
Micah Lee – The Intercept,
2 Feb 2015
People often tell reporters things their employers, or their government, want to keep suppressed. But leaking can serve the public interest, fueling revelatory and important journalism. This publication was created in part as a platform for journalism arising from unauthorized disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
→ read full articleSaudi Arabia’s Tyrant King Misremembered as Man of Peace
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
26 Jan 2015
It’s not often that the unelected leader of a country which publicly flogs dissidents and beheads people for sorcery wins such glowing praise from American officials and the Western press.
→ read full articleHow Al Qaeda’s Biggest Enemy Took Over Yemen (and Why the U.S. Government Is Unlikely to Support Them)
Casey L. Coombs and Jeremy Scahill – The Intercept,
26 Jan 2015
22 Jan 2015 – Yemen’s president, his prime minister and entire cabinet resigned, giving unprecedented power to the Houthis, a Shiite minority from the country’s northern highlands.
→ read full articleCompare and Contrast: Obama’s Reaction to the Deaths of King Abdullah and Hugo Chávez
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
26 Jan 2015
Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela four times from 1998 through 2012 and was admired and supported by a large majority of that country’s citizens, largely due to his policies that helped the poor. King Abdullah was the dictator and tyrant who ran one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
→ read full articleAl Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Develops Its Own Version of Reddit’s AMA and Twitter’s Blue Checkmark Verification
Jeremy Scahill – The Intercept,
26 Jan 2015
AQAP has deployed social media operatives on Twitter to spread its message and to engage with its followers and critics alike. Despite U.S. government attempts to shut down its accounts, AQAP has proven effective at maintaining its own bizarro verification methods.
→ read full articleFrance Arrests a Comedian for His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West’s “Free Speech” Celebration
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
19 Jan 2015
14 Jan 2015 – Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.”
→ read full articleIn Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
12 Jan 2015
To comport with this new principle for how one shows solidarity with free speech rights and a vibrant free press, we’re publishing some blasphemous and otherwise offensive cartoons about religion and their adherents:
→ read full articleHow Clint Eastwood Ignores History in ‘American Sniper’
Peter Maass – The Intercept,
12 Jan 2015
“A lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages,’” he wrote. “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.” A decorated Navy SEAL, Kyle killed more than 150 “savages” in Iraq, becoming the deadliest sniper in the annals of American warfare.
→ read full articleAl Qaeda Source: AQAP Directed Paris Attack
Jeremy Scahill – The Intercept,
12 Jan 2015
9 Jan 2015 — A source within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has provided The Intercept with a full statement claiming responsibility for the attack against the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
→ read full articleNorth Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
5 Jan 2015
The overwhelming narrative disseminated by the U.S. media was clear: North Korea was responsible for the hack, because the government said it was.
→ read full articleNSA Releases Christmas Eve Surprise
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
29 Dec 2014
26 Dec 20145 – The NSA on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.
→ read full articleThe Mysterious Case of Prisoner 212
Cora Currier and Margot Williams – The Intercept,
29 Dec 2014
That al-Libi was held by the CIA is long established. After all, al-Libi’s name is notorious as the source of bad information used by the Bush administration to tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to support the US invasion of Iraq — information he provided while being tortured in Egyptian custody, and later recanted.
→ read full articleSony Hack: Clooney Says Movie is about Snowden, Not Journalism
Natasha Vargas-Cooper – The Intercept,
23 Dec 2014
22 Dec 2014 – As curious journalists, tabloid writers, and Hollywood watchers pore over the massive trove of hacked Sony data, the public is being given a rare glimpse into the complicated world of Hollywood and politics.
→ read full articleU.S. TV Provides Ample Platform for American Torturers, But None to Their Victims
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
22 Dec 2014
Whether by design (most likely) or effect, this inexcusable omission radically distorts coverage. Whenever America is forced to confront its heinous acts, the central strategy is to disappear the victims, render them silenced and invisible. It is the biggest favor the U.S. television media could do for the government over which they claim to act as watchdogs.
→ read full articleTorture’s Queen: Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA’s Torture Scandals
Glenn Greenwald and Peter Maass – The Intercept,
22 Dec 2014
The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee).
→ read full articleOperation Socialist: The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
15 Dec 2014
Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies.
→ read full articleOperation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
8 Dec 2014
4 Dec 2014 – According to documents provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.
→ read full articleAt Global Climate Conferences, Spying Is Just Part of the Woodwork
Alleen Brown – The Intercept,
8 Dec 2014
According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a spy from Britain’s GCHQ went disguised as a UK delegate to the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and another was deployed to the UN’s Cancun climate talks in 2010. This followed news last winter that the NSA also spied on the Copenhagen negotiations.
→ read full article12 Things to Keep in Mind When You Read the Torture Report
Dan Froomkin – The Intercept,
8 Dec 2014
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report will be released “in a matter of days,” a committee staffer tells The Intercept. Should something emerge, here are some important caveats to keep in mind.
→ read full articleSecret Malware in European Union Attack Linked to U.S. and British Intelligence
Morgan Marquis-Boire, Claudio Guarnieri, and Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
1 Dec 2014
Complex malware known as Regin is the suspected technology behind sophisticated cyberattacks conducted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies on the European Union and a Belgian telecommunications company, according to security industry sources and technical analysis conducted by The Intercept.
→ read full articleHow to Encrypt the Entire Web for Free
Micah Lee – The Intercept,
24 Nov 2014
If we’ve learned one thing from the Snowden revelations, it’s that what can be spied on will be spied on. Since the advent of what used to be known as the World Wide Web, it has been a relatively simple matter for network attackers—whether it’s the NSA, Chinese intelligence, your employer, your university, abusive partners, or teenage hackers on the same public WiFi as you—to spy on almost everything you do online.
→ read full articleVodafone-Linked Company Aided British Mass Surveillance
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
24 Nov 2014
According to the reports, British telecommunications firms have helped GCHQ dramatically scale-up the volume of internet data it collects from undersea cables. In the five years leading up to 2012, there was a 7,000-fold increase in the amount of data the agency was sweeping up.
→ read full articleOn Media Outlets That Continue to Describe Unknown Drone Victims as “Militants”
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
24 Nov 2014
Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties of his drone strikes which “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
→ read full articleThe Sunday Shows Are Completely Infatuated With War
Andrew Jerell Jones – The Intercept,
24 Nov 2014
In a two-week, three-episode span in September, America’s prominent Sunday news talk shows featured 89 guests talking about U.S. military options in Syria and Iraq. Only one of those guests, The Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, would count as “anti-war.”
→ read full articleSon of Stuxnet: The Digital Hunt for Duqu, a Dangerous and Cunning U.S.-Israeli Spy Virus
Kim Zetter – The Intercept,
18 Nov 2014
It was clear to them immediately that Duqu was the work of master programmers.
→ read full articleWhat Happened to the Humanitarians Who Wanted to Save Libyans With Bombs and Drones?
Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
18 Nov 2014
Just three years after NATO’s military intervention in Libya ended and was widely heralded by its proponents as a resounding success, that country is in complete collapse.
→ read full articleArt in a Time of Surveillance
Peter Maass – The Intercept,
18 Nov 2014
Art Prof. Hasan Elahi has taken about 70,000 pictures of the buildings he’s visited, the beds he’s slept in, the food he’s eaten, the toilets he’s used, the roads he’s travelled on. “By disclosing mundane details about my daily life, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life,” he writes. “I am flooding the market with banal information, and questioning its inherent meaning and value for intelligence purposes.”
→ read full articleSenator Who Put Pentagon Papers into Public Record Urges Udall to Do Same with Torture Report
Dan Froomkin – The Intercept,
18 Nov 2014
Mike Gravel is urging Sen. Mark Udall to read the CIA torture report into the Congressional Record.
→ read full articlePsychologists Are Rethinking Their Cozy Relationship with Bush Torture Program
Cora Currier – The Intercept,
18 Nov 2014
The American Psychological Association is launching an independent investigation over how it may have sanctioned the brutal interrogation methods used against terror suspects by the Bush administration.
→ read full articleHow Many Muslim Countries Has the U.S. Bombed or Occupied since 1980?
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
10 Nov 2014
Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed. Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.
→ read full articleSecret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide
Cora Currier and Morgan Marquis-Boire – The Intercept,
3 Nov 2014
There are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleA Small Band of Activists Is Humiliating an Israeli Shipping Giant
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
3 Nov 2014
Capping a series of victories by a modest band of pro-Palestinian activists, an Israel-based shipping company has re-routed a container ship from the Port of Oakland, where protestors had vowed to keep the ship from unloading, to an alternate destination in Russia.
→ read full articleBlowing the Whistle on CIA Torture from Beyond the Grave
Cora Currier – The Intercept,
20 Oct 2014
The APA said that any suggestion “that APA had a financial motivation” to support U.S. detainee policies “is absurd.” The CIA declined to comment on Gerwehr or the allegations raised from his emails. “I believe that Gerwehr encountered something deeply disturbing,” said Raymond.
→ read full articleNew Zealand Cops Raided Home of Reporter Working on Snowden Documents
Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
20 Oct 2014
16 Oct 2014 – Agents from New Zealand’s national police force ransacked the home of a prominent independent journalist earlier this month who was collaborating with The Intercept on stories from the NSA archive furnished by Edward Snowden.
→ read full articleCore Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany
Peter Maass and Laura Poitras – The Intercept,
13 Oct 2014
The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleThe Fake Terror Threat Used to Justify Bombing Syria
Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
6 Oct 2014
Administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland: “The Khorasan Group.”
→ read full articleManaging a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb
Ryan Devereaux – The Intercept,
29 Sep 2014
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
→ read full articleHow Former Treasury Officials and the UAE Are Manipulating American Journalists
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
29 Sep 2014
A bizarre neocon/ Israel/ Gulf-dictator coalition is now driving not only U.S. policy but U.S. discourse, as well, aided by ex U.S. officials.
→ read full articleSyria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate
Glenn Greenwald - The Intercept,
29 Sep 2014
… after President Barack Obama bombed Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq. The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors.
→ read full articleNo, Snowden’s Leaks Didn’t Help the Terrorists
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
22 Sep 2014
Did Edward Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance compromise the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor terrorist groups? Contrary to lurid claims made by U.S. officials, a new independent analysis of the subject says no.
→ read full articleU.S. Falling into the Islamic State’s Trap
Dan Froomkin – The Intercept,
22 Sep 2014
There are many reasons the U.S. shouldn’t go to war with the Islamic State — and the best one may be because that is exactly what they want us to do.
→ read full articleNew ISIS Propaganda Film Features Canadian-Sounding Fighter
Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
22 Sep 2014
The militant group Islamic State released a slick and disturbing new propaganda film, “Flames of War,” narrated entirely in English and featuring an Islamic State fighter who speaks with an American or Canadian accent.
→ read full articleSnowden: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Isn’t Telling the Truth about Mass Surveillance
Edward Snowden – The Intercept,
22 Sep 2014
Let me be clear: any statement that mass surveillance is not performed in New Zealand, or that the internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, or that this is not intentionally and actively abetted by the GCSB, is categorically false.
→ read full articleMurky Special Ops Have Become Corporate Bonanza
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
15 Sep 2014
The U.S. government is paying private contractors billions of dollars to support secretive military units with drones, surveillance technology, and “psychological operations,” according to new research.
→ read full articleMap of the Stars
Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Michael Sontheimer and Christian Grothoff – The Intercept,
15 Sep 2014
The NSA and GCHQ Campaign against German Satellite Companies – “Fuck!” That is the word that comes to the mind of Christian Steffen, the CEO of German satellite communications company Stellar PCS.
→ read full articleThe U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
8 Sep 2014
After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
→ read full articleMedia Should Be Challenging Arguments for War, Not Baying for Blood
Dan Froomkin – The Intercept,
8 Sep 2014
Pundits and reporters are competing for who can be more scornful of President Obama for his insufficiently militaristic response to IS. They are gleefully parsing Obama’s language for weakness, while failing to ask the tough questions about what if any good it could actually accomplish.
→ read full articleThe CIA’s Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories with Agency before Publication
Ken Silverstein – The Intercept,
8 Sep 2014
A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleThe Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
1 Sep 2014
The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleShould Twitter, Facebook and Google Executives Be the Arbiters of What We See and Read?
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
25 Aug 2014
It’s tempting to support criminalization of, say, racist views as long as one focuses on one’s contempt for those views and ignores the serious dangers of vesting the state with the general power to create lists of prohibited ideas.
→ read full articleU.S. Military Bans The Intercept
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
25 Aug 2014
20 Aug 2014 – The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets.
→ read full articleYou Can Get Hacked Just by Watching This Cat Video on YouTube
Morgan Marquis-Boire – The Intercept,
18 Aug 2014
Many people think they have to do something wrong, or stupid, or insecure to get hacked—like clicking on the wrong attachments, or browsing malicious websites. But according to research I am releasing today at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, many of these commonly held beliefs are not necessarily true.
→ read full articleLeaked Files: German Spy Company Helped Bahrain Hack Arab Spring Protesters
Cora Currier and Morgan Marquis-Boire – The Intercept,
11 Aug 2014
7 Aug 2014 – A notorious surveillance technology company that helps governments around the world spy on their citizens sold software to Bahrain during that country’s brutal response to the Arab Spring movement, according to leaked internal documents posted this week on the internet.
→ read full articleBarack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers
Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux – The Intercept,
11 Aug 2014
5 Aug 2014 – Nearly half of the 680,000 people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleU.S. “Humanitarian” Bombing of Iraq: A Redundant Presidential Ritual
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
11 Aug 2014
For those who ask “what should be done?,” has the hideous aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya not taught the crucial lessons that (a) bombing for ostensibly “humanitarian” ends virtually never fulfills the claimed goals but rather almost always makes the situation worse; (b) the U.S. military is not designed, and is not deployed, for “humanitarian” purposes?; and (c) …
→ read full articleCash, Weapons and Surveillance: The U.S. Is a Key Party to Every Israeli Attack
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
4 Aug 2014
Top secret documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shed substantial new light on how the U.S. and its partners directly enable Israel’s military assaults – such as the one on Gaza.
→ read full articleTerrorism in the Israeli Attack on Gaza
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
4 Aug 2014
As I’ve written many times before, “terrorism” is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning. It’s a fear-mongering slogan, lacking any consistent application, intended to end rational debate and justify virtually any conduct by those who apply the term.
→ read full articleThe NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police
Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain – The Intercept,
28 Jul 2014
25 Jul 2014 – The NSA last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by Edward Snowden details the agency’s plans “to provide direct analytic and technical support” to the Saudis on “internal security” matters.
→ read full articleThe Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist
Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux – The Intercept,
28 Jul 2014
23 Jul 2014 – The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
→ read full articleHacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
21 Jul 2014
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.”
→ read full articleNBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza after Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
21 Jul 2014
17 Jul 2014 – Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately.
→ read full articleHow Secret Partners Expand NSA’s Surveillance Dragnet
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
30 Jun 2014
18 Jun 2014 – Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
→ read full articleData Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas
Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – The Intercept,
26 May 2014
The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government.
→ read full articleBritish Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA’s Data Pools
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
5 May 2014
British surveillance agency GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year, classified documents provided NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal.
→ read full articleExcerpt from «The Battle for Justice in Palestine»
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
28 Apr 2014
Like most of what he writes and says, Ali Abunimah’s new book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, is provocative, erudite, impassioned, aggressive, and certain to make even some political allies uncomfortable with their tacitly held beliefs (beginning with the book’s very first sentence: “The Palestinians are winning”)
→ read full articleThe “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
7 Apr 2014
One previously undisclosed top-secret document–prepared by GCHQ for the 2010 annual “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance comprising the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.–explicitly discusses ways to exploit Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media as secret platforms for propaganda.
→ read full articleUS Takes a Break from Condemning Tyranny to Celebrate Obama’s Visit to Saudi Arabia
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
31 Mar 2014
The closest US ally of them all also just happens to be one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes: the House of Saud. The administration revealed “plans to offer advanced aircraft to Saudi Arabia worth up to $60 billion, the largest US arms deal ever, and naval missile-defense upgrades worth tens of billions of dollars more.”
→ read full articleDer Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
31 Mar 2014
Secret documents newly disclosed by the German newspaper Der Spiegel on Saturday [29 Mar 2014] shed more light on how aggressively the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have targeted Germany for surveillance.
→ read full articleSome Facts about How NSA Stories Are Reported
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
24 Mar 2014
Several members of the august “US Journalists Against Transparency” club are outraged by revelations in yesterday’s New York Times (jointly published by der Spiegel) that the NSA has been hacking the products of the Chinese tech company Huawei as well as Huawei itself at exactly the same time (and in exactly the same way) as the US Government has been claiming the Chinese government hacks.
→ read full articleInside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators
Ryan Gallagher and Peter Maass – The Intercept,
24 Mar 2014
According to a secret document provided by Edward Snowden, the NSA tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.
→ read full articleForeign Officials in the Dark about Their Own Spy Agencies’ Cooperation with NSA
Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
17 Mar 2014
One of the more bizarre aspects of the last nine months of Snowden revelations is how top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations’ cooperation with the National Security Agency, as well as their own spying activities.
→ read full articleHow the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware
Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald – The Intercept,
17 Mar 2014
The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.
→ read full articleCompare the NSA’s Facebook Malware Denial to Its Own Secret Documents
Ryan Gallagher – The Intercept,
17 Mar 2014
On Wednesday [12 Mar 2014], Glenn Greenwald and I revealed new details that the NSA secretly pretended to be a fake Facebook server in order to covertly infect targets with malware “implants.” This revelation apparently infuriated Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg so much that he got on the phone to President Barack Obama to complain about it.
→ read full article