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Meet 'The Intercept': Glenn Greenwald's News Site Has Arrived

Glenn Greenwald’s new journalistic venture has launched.

By Ben Cosman
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

Glenn Greenwald’s new journalistic venture has launched.

In collaboration with fellow editors Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, Greenwald heads The Intercept as a publication of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media.

Until now, Greenwald has been publishing his NSA stories (fueled by leaks from Edward Snowden) in collaboration with news establishments like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, but now they’ll have their own platform to pursue the governments of the world from.

The site is starting off with basically just two stories, both NSA-focused. The first is from photographer Trevor Paglen featuring aerial photographs of the NSA complex, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The second is by Scahill and Greenwald divulging the method the NSA uses to determine the targets for drone strikes. The article sites documents from Snowden along with information from a former drone operator with the U.S. military and reveals that the NSA relies heavily on electronic surveillance (typically from the NSA’s metadata and cell phone-tracking) instead of human identification, which “results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.”

The site went live just a few days after Greenwald said that he plans to return to the U.S. and essentially dared law enforcement to arrest him. He will feature heavily into the site, as expected – there’s a specific sub-section dedicated to him on the homepage – but The Intercept will eventually move beyond its NSA-centric coverage as it grows “into [a] broader and more comprehensive news outlet.”

An independent news site that will operate as a nonprofit, The Intercept will eventually cover a variety of topics, though for now will stick to a predictable one, according the opening editor's note.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.