Favorite Matt Taibbi, who joined First Look Media just seven months ago, left the company on Tuesday. His departure—which he describes as a refusal to accept a work reassignment, and the company describes as a resignation—was the culmination of months of contentious disputes with First Look founder Pierre Omidyar, chief operating officer Randy Ching, and…
All posts in The Intercept
Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama’s ‘Look Forward, Not Backwards’ Approach to Torture
Favorite Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution. The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking…
White House Press Corps Whines It’s Not Spoonfed Enough
Favorite The blog post by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple had a promising headline: USA Today’s Susan Page: Obama administration most ‘dangerous’ to media in history. And the first paragraph provided a nice compendium of similar critiques from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, New York Times reporter James Risen, and CBS…
The U.S. Government Is Suddenly Way, Way More Interested In Tracking Snail Mail
Favorite Old-fashioned mail, the kind sent through the U.S. Post Office, has fallen out of fashion; U.S. first-class mail volume fell 36 percent from its 2001 peak to the end of last year, and total mail volume has been falling in tandem. But the surveillance state’s interest in snail mail has shot up massively. A…
The FBI Was So Hapless Hunting a Teen Kid, It Had To Pretend To Be from a Newspaper
Favorite The Federal Bureau of Investigation decided in 2007 that it didn’t need to be the Federal Bureau of Investigation to trick a teenager online. Instead, it acted as a local newspaper. At the time, the FBI wanted to identify the owner of an anonymous MySpace account connected to bomb threats against a high school…
Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.
Favorite Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two…
Iraq War Now Being Fought By People Who Were Just Kids When It Started
Favorite Last week, the Pentagon announced the death of the first American serviceman in the war against ISIS. Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Neal was killed in what was described as a “non-combat incident” in Iraq, making him the first American to die in “Operation Inherent Resolve” – America’s latest military excursion into that country. Cpl. Neal…
Compare How U.S. Responds To The Killing Of American Kids Based On Identity Of The Killers
Favorite Last Wednesday in Jerusalem, a three-month-old American baby was killed, and eight other people injured, when a car plowed into a crowded sidewalk; the driver, a 20-year-old Palestinian named Abed a-Rahman a-Shaludi, was killed by police when he tried to flee the scene. The family of the driver insisted it was an accident, but Israeli officials…
Frustrated CIA Blames Torture Report Delays on Senators Who Want It To Be Intelligible
Favorite The CIA today hotly denied that it is intentionally holding up the release of a Senate report on its role in torturing detainees, charging instead that Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee is responsible for dragging out the negotiations. “The suggestion that CIA is delaying or obstructing the negotiations over redactions is patently false,” agency…
All the NSA Will Say About Its Alarmingly Entrepreneurial Top Spy Is That She’s Resigning
Favorite Teresa O’Shea used to be the National Security Agency’s director of signals intelligence, plus the wife of an executive in the business of selling things to agencies like hers, plus the host of a home-based signals intelligence business, plus the owner, via yet another business, of a six-seat airplane and resort-town condo. She’s going…