The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html

Internal documents show how a source ended up in jail — and the fallout in the newsroom.

One of the people who fell in love with that story was Pierre Omidyar, the earnest if remote billionaire founder of eBay. That October, he pledged $250 million for a new institution led by those two journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Mr. Omidyar was the benefactor of journalists’ dreams. He promised total independence for a new nonprofit news site, The Intercept, under the umbrella of his First Look Media. The Intercept was founded in the belief that “the prime value of journalism is that it imposes transparency, and thus accountability, on those who wield the greatest governmental and corporate power.” The outlet’s first mission was to set up a secure archive of Mr. Snowden’s documents, and to keep mining them for stories.

The recent history of the news business has been about what happens when your traditional business is disrupted by the internet and your revenues dry up. But at The Intercept and First Look, the story is of a different destabilizing force: gushers of money.

In 2017, the for-profit arm of the company had budgeted $40 million for a growing staff and bets on movies and television shows, a former executive said, while the nonprofit arm spent about $26 million in 2017 and again in 2018 according to its public filings, most of it on The Intercept.

High-profile stars collected big salaries — Mr. Greenwald brought in more than $500,000 in 2015 — and they sometimes clashed in public with their titular bosses over the rocky efforts to build an organization. Writers warred on Twitter and in Slack messages over Donald Trump, race and the politics of the left. Mr. Greenwald continues to infuriate younger colleagues with tweets like one denouncing “woke ideologues.”

All the drama would make this another colorful story about extreme newsroom dysfunction had The Intercept not caught the attention of a naïve National Security Agency linguist with the improbable name of Reality Winner in 2017. Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.

First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s massive trove of leaked National Security Agency documents.

Over the past several years, The Intercept, which is owned by First Look Media, has maintained a research team to handle the large number of documents provided by Snowden to Intercept journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

NSA Hasn’t Implemented Post-Snowden Security Fixes, Audit Finds
https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2018/07/nsa-hasnt-implemented-post-snowden-security-fixes-audit-finds/150067/

The spy agency also fell short on numerous information security requirements, according to its first public audit overview.

The nation’s cyber spy agency is suffering from substantial cyber vulnerabilities, according to a first-of-its-kind unclassified audit overview from the agency’s inspector general released Wednesday.

Those vulnerabilities include computer system security plans that are inaccurate or incomplete, removable media that aren’t properly scanned for viruses, and an inadequate process for tracking the job duties of National Security Agency cyber defenders to ensure they’re qualified for the highest-level work they do, according to the overview.

Perhaps most striking, the agency has not properly implemented “two-person access controls” on its data centers and equipment rooms.

Former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander instituted the two-person access system after contractor Edward Snowden leaked reams of data about agency spy programs in 2013. The general idea is that no employee or contractor can access sensitive information unless another employee approves it.

Those information security weaknesses are described in the unclassified version of the NSA inspector general’s semiannual report to Congress.

As of March 31, NSA had 699 open inspector general recommendations, according to the report, 76 percent of which were overdue.

https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/oig-sa-reports/OIG%20UNCLASS%20SAR%20OCT-MAR%202018.pdf

A report by NBC News cites unnamed US intelligence sources claiming that Russian officials are deliberating a handover of Edward Snowden as a “gift” to the Trump administration. Since leaking information on the NSA’s “PRISM” surveillance, the former government contractor has been living in Russia since 2013 on a permit and is a year away from being able to apply for citizenship. He still faces federal charges, and previously, Donald Trump has called Snowden a “traitor,” and a “spy who should be executed.”

Snowden himself tweeted out the NBC report, along with a claim that it represents “irrefutable evidence that I never cooperated with Russian intel. No country trades away spies, as the rest would fear they’re next.”

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned Donald Trump, as US President, could do a deal with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to extradite or imprison the whistleblower.

In an hour-long live-streamed video interview on Periscope with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey today, Snowden argued the US had trapped him in Russia when it cancelled his passport. The ex-NSA IT nerd added the incoming White House administration – which seemingly has better relations with the Russian government than the Obama regime – may be able to get him kicked out of the country and delivered into the hands of Uncle Sam, or otherwise imprisoned.

“It could happen, sure, but am I worried? Not really – I am very comfortable with decisions I made and know I did the right thing,” he said.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a “public service” by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques, but still must pay a penalty for illegally leaking a trove of classified intelligence documents.
“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,”

“Now I would say that doing what he did — and the way he did it — was inappropriate and illegal,” Holder added.

Holder said Snowden jeopardized America’s security interests by leaking classified information while working as a contractor for the National Security Agency in 2013.

“He harmed American interests,”

Snowden, who has spent the last few years in exile in Russia, should return to the U.S. to deal with the consequences, Holder noted.

“I think that he’s got to make a decision. He’s broken the law in my view.”

“But,” Holder emphasized, “I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate.”

Snowden Archive
——The SidToday
Files
https://theintercept.com/snowden-sidtoday/

SIDtoday is the internal newsletter for the NSA’s most important division, the Signals Intelligence Directorate. After editorial review, The Intercept is releasing nine years’ worth of newsletters in batches, starting with 2003. The agency’s spies explain a surprising amount about what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why.

Super-leaker Edward Snowden is suing the government of Norway.

What? Isn’t Snowden in Russia? And isn’t his beef with the United States?

Yes, on both counts. But Snowden has just been awarded something called the Ossietzky Prize, an award named after German pacifist, journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Carl von Ossietzky.

Ossietzky won the Nobel for revealing details of Germany’s re-armament, which violated the Treaty of Versailles.

The Ossietzky Prize is awarded by an organisation called Norsk PEN, the Norwegian branch of freedom of speech promotion body PEN International. Norsk Pen says it chose Snowden “to pay respect to the unique role he has undertaken as a whistle blower.” Having made its choice, the organisation “will do our utmost to ensure that Snowden may receive the prize in person.”

Snowden fears that if leaves Russia he will be apprehended by United States authorities, extradited and put on trial back home.

A Government Error Just Revealed Snowden Was the Target in the Lavabit Case
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/

It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.

Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.

But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.

Here’s a quick recap of that case: On June 28, 2013, shortly after newspapers published the first NSA leaks from Snowden, FBI agents showed up at Levison’s door in Texas and served him with a pen register order requiring him to give the government metadata for the email activity of one customer’s account.

The case was initially sealed and the public didn’t learn about it and the fight over Levison’s customer until after he had shuttered his email service in defiance of the government.