Thursday, June 8, 2017

Do Not Trust The Intercept or How To Burn A Source

Click here to access article by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama

I've long had my suspicions back  about The Intercept which was strongly reinforced by a series of Newsbud's (formerly Boiling Frogs) articles in 2013 and 2014 about Glenn Greenwald's reluctance to release the treasure trove of NSA linked spying documents that Edward Snowden gave him. Bernhard makes a very good case that we should not trust The Intercept.
The Intercept, a subdivision of First Look Media, was founded by Pierre Omidyar, a major owner of the auctioning site eBay and its PayPal banking division. Omidyar is a billionaire and "philanthropist" who's (tax avoiding) Omidyar Network foundation is "investing" for "returns". Its microcredit project for farmers in India, in cooperation with people from the fascists RSS party, ended in an epidemic of suicides when the farmers were unable to pay back. The Omidyar Network also funded (fascist) regime change groups in Ukraine in cooperation with USAID. Omidyar had cozy relations with the Obama White House. Some of the held back NSA documents likely implicate Omidyar's PayPal.

The Intercept was funded with some $50 million from Omidyar. Its first hires were Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras - all involved in publishing the Snowden papers and other leaks. Its first piece was based on documents from the leaked NSA stack. It has since published on this or that but not in a regular media way.  The Intercept pieces are usually heavily editorialized and tend to have a mainstream "liberal" to libertarian slant.