The Intercept https://theintercept.com/transparency/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:19:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 220955519 <![CDATA[The Search for a Pete Buttigieg Fundraiser]]> https://theintercept.com/2019/12/13/the-search-for-a-pete-buttigieg-fundraiser/ https://theintercept.com/2019/12/13/the-search-for-a-pete-buttigieg-fundraiser/#respond Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:13:38 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=282255 Activists heard that Buttigieg might be opening up his high-dollar fundraisers. But finding the location along Manhattan’s wealthiest corridors wasn’t easy.

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]]> Activists heard that Buttigieg might be opening up his high-dollar fundraisers. But finding the location along Manhattan’s wealthiest corridors wasn’t easy.

The post The Search for a Pete Buttigieg Fundraiser appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2019/12/13/the-search-for-a-pete-buttigieg-fundraiser/feed/ 0 282255 <![CDATA[In the Trump Era, Leaking and Whistleblowing Are More Urgent, and More Noble, Than Ever]]> https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/in-the-trump-era-leaking-and-whistleblowing-are-more-urgent-and-more-noble-than-ever/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/in-the-trump-era-leaking-and-whistleblowing-are-more-urgent-and-more-noble-than-ever/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2016 17:08:36 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=96736 Trump has not yet been inaugurated, but all signs point to a presidency that will be deeply hostile to basic precepts of transparency. The Intercept is determined to enable sources to work with journalists in the safest way possible.

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]]> For the past 15 years, the U.S. government under both parties has invented whole new methods for hiding what it does behind an increasingly impenetrable wall of secrecy. From radical new legal doctrines designed to shield its behavior from judicial review to prosecuting sources at record rates, more and more government action has been deliberately hidden from the public.

One of the very few remaining avenues for learning what the U.S. government is doing — beyond the propaganda that it wants Americans to ingest and thus deliberately disseminates through media outlets — is leaking and whistleblowing. Among the leading U.S. heroes in the war on terror have been the men and women inside various agencies of the U.S. government who discovered serious wrongdoing being carried out in secret, and then risked their own personal welfare to ensure that the public learned of what never should have been hidden in the first place.

Many of the important, consequential revelations from the last two administrations were possible only because of courageous sources who came forward in this way. It’s how we learned about the abuses of Abu Ghraib, the existence of torture-fueled CIA “black sites,” the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, the wanton slaughter carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recklessness and deceit at the heart of the U.S. drone program, the NSA’s secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless, mass surveillance ever created, and so many other scandals, frauds, and war crimes that otherwise would have remained hidden. All of that reporting was possible only because people of conscience decided to disregard the U.S. government’s corrupt decree that this information should remain secret, on the ground that concealing it was designed to protect not national security but rather the reputations and interests of political officials.

For that reason, when The Intercept was created, enabling safe and productive whistleblowing was central to our mission. We hired some of the world’s most skilled technologists, experts in information security and encryption, to provide maximum security for our journalists and our sources. We adopted the most advanced programs for enabling sources to communicate and provide information to us anonymously and without detection, such as SecureDrop. And we made an institutional commitment to expend whatever resources are necessary to defend the right of a free press to report without threats of recrimination, and to do everything possible to protect and defend our sources who enable that vital journalism.

Over the past two years, we have published several articles by our security experts on how sources (and others) can communicate and provide information to us in the safest and most secure manner possible, to minimize the chances of being detected. We’ve published interviews with other experts, such as Edward Snowden, on the most powerful tools and methods available for securing one’s online communications. As our technologist Micah Lee explained, no method is perfect, so “caution is still advised to those who want to communicate with us without exposing their real-world identities,” but tools and practices do exist to maximize anonymity, and we are committed to using those and informing the public about how to use them in the safest and most effective manner possible.

Image: The Intercept

Donald Trump has not yet been inaugurated, but all the signs point to a presidency that will be deeply hostile to basic precepts of transparency. During the campaign, he repeatedly violated long-standing norms of disclosure, including even a refusal to make his income tax returns public, and already has broken with tradition by refusing during the transition to provide basic information about his whereabouts or activities.

Beyond that, the institutions of the executive branch are well-trained to resist transparency as much as possible and have been vested with countless tools to conceal their most important activities. Institutional inertia by itself, let alone once exacerbated by Trump’s own anti-transparency impulses, all but guarantees the Trump presidency will be aggressively antagonistic to basic public accountability.

For all those reasons, The Intercept is more determined than ever to do everything possible to enable sources, leakers, and whistleblowers to work with our journalists in the safest way possible, to ensure that information that belongs in the public domain is reported rather than hidden. There will undoubtedly be all sorts of actions and information in the Trump administration that will be concealed but that should be known, and the public will need courageous whistleblowers and leakers inside the government to ensure that it sees the light of day.

Top photo: “Anything to Say?” is a bronze sculpture and art installation by Italian sculptor Davide Dormino, representing, from left, whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning next to the U.N. offices in Geneva on Sept. 15, 2015.

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]]> https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/in-the-trump-era-leaking-and-whistleblowing-are-more-urgent-and-more-noble-than-ever/feed/ 244 96736 securedrop-intercept <![CDATA[What Julian Assange's War on Hillary Clinton Says About WikiLeaks]]> https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-beside-point/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-beside-point/#comments Sat, 06 Aug 2016 19:04:25 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=77366 Assange’s project has always been about opposition research. WikiLeaks exists to find dirt in the servers of the powerful and bring them down by exposing it.

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]]> In recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.

This has puzzled some of the group’s supporters, and led to speculation that the site’s Australian founder, Julian Assange, had timed the release of emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to drive a wedge between supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The publication of emails that revealed an anti-Sanders agenda inside the Democratic party was certainly welcomed by the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

But it should come as no surprise to anyone who looks back at the founding principles of WikiLeaks that Assange — who has clearly stated his distaste for the idea of the former secretary of state becoming president — would make aggressive use of leaked documents to try to undermine her.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

In other words, Assange’s project has been from the start more like opposition research than dispassionate reporting. His goal is to find dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations he sees as corrupt or dangerous, and bring them down by exposing it. As he memorably told Der Spiegel in 2010, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

His recent focus on “crushing” Clinton but not Trump has led some to ask Assange if he is worried about helping to elect someone who might be even more hostile to him — let alone to the causes of justice and peace that have motivated Wikileaks’ previous disclosures. Asked recently by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” if he does prefer Trump over Clinton, Assange replied, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?”

Speaking to Bill Maher on Friday night from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been effectively confined for more than four years, Assange joked about hacking Trump’s tax returns, but added, “from the perspective of WikiLeaks trying to protect its sources, you have really two very bad presidential candidates.”

In an address to the American Green Party convention on Saturday, Assange reiterated that both major party candidates for the presidency were “horrific,” but argued that “it certainly doesn’t make as much difference as people say,” which of them gets elected. What is important, he said, is to build political pressure “to discipline and hold to account and check the abuses of power during the next four years.”

To better understand Assange’s recent intervention in the U.S. election, it helps to look more closely at a sort of manifesto he wrote as he was creating WikiLeaks. The same month that WikiLeaks.org went live, in December of 2006, Assange posted an essay on his blog, “Conspiracy as Governance,” in which he explained his theory that authoritarian regimes — and western political parties — maintain power by conspiring to keep the public in the dark, through “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” In order for the people to regain control of the political system, Assange argued, it is necessary to find ways of “throttling the conspiracy,” like disrupting the ability of the conspirators to communicate secretly.

With that in mind, Assange wrote, “let us consider two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic and Republican parties.” He continued, “Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems which manage their subscribers, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns? They would immediately fall into an organisational stupor and lose to the other.”

A decade later, by releasing thousands of unredacted emails and voice-mail messages hacked from the Democratic Party — in a database that makes it easy to search for the social security numbers of donors, as well as their passport and credit card details — Assange was finally able to put his theory into practice, by attempting to throttle one of the “conspiratorial power groupings” that selects candidates to run the U.S. government.

Assange’s attack on the DNC certainly revealed hypocrisy within the party, and led to the resignations of four senior officials, but his decision to not redact personal information from those documents — or from a second cache of emails hacked from a Turkish political party — also led to criticism from some longtime supporters, including Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

My colleague Glenn Greenwald also told Slate last week that he was troubled by the fact that WikiLeaks had abandoned its previous policy of redaction. “There were tons of redactions when they were releasing Pentagon documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,” he noted. “And they even wrote a letter to the State Department before they released the cables requesting the State Department’s help in figuring out which information ought to be withheld.”

Although Assange has spoken of the dumping of “pristine,” unedited documents as a philosophical principle — and his biographer Andrew O’Hagan reported that the collapse of his working relationship with the editors of the New York Times and the Guardian was partly fueled by disagreements about redaction — it seems possible that the intense pressure on the organization has also made it nearly impossible to carry out careful editing of every document it obtains. Assange continues to be confined to Ecuador’s embassy in London — which has been described as illegal, “arbitrary detention” by a United Nations panel — and Sarah Harrison, who was the site’s investigations editor, has chosen to live in exile in Berlin since helping Snowden get from Hong Kong to Russia, heeding legal advice that she could face prosecution if she tried to return to Britain.

Whatever the reason, it is difficult to see a public-interest argument for making public some of what was contained in the DNC files. One of the voice-mail recordings, for instance, was a conversation between a staffer and his young child during a visit to a zoo, which appears to have been left by accident, following a pocket-dial. The staffer’s phone number was made available, much to the delight of some Trump supporters.

https://twitter.com/dileximan/status/759183261251665921

As the Turkish scholar Zeynep Tufekci explained in the Huffington Post, a trove of Turkish-language emails WikiLeaks released last month, inaccurately presented as private messages from members of Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, also included little of public interest but did reveal the private information of ordinary citizens.

To make matters worse, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed also shared a link to another cache of hacked Turkish documents that included home addresses or phone numbers for every female voter in 79 of Turkey’s 81 provinces.

Unfortunately, for believers in the WikiLeaks project, Assange has responded to criticism of his redaction-free document dumps by attacking even longtime supporters who have spoken out. The @wikiLeaks Twitter account the site’s founder uses to annotate documents and rebut critics replied angrily to Snowden’s message about the desirability of some sort of selective editing, accusing the NSA whistleblower whom Assange helped get asylum in Russia of angling for a pardon from Clinton.

WikiLeaks also suggested, wrongly, that Tufekci is an “apologist” for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a leader she has, in fact, frequently criticized for his opposition to internet freedom.

Of course, Assange is hardly alone in being quick to denounce his critics on Twitter, but the way in which he uses the @wikileaks account these days matters to the overall functioning of the organization because it is the only obvious way for outsiders to provide feedback on the annotation or analysis of the documents. Despite the site’s name, WikiLeaks never developed into a Wikipedia-like website that welcomes, or facilitates crowd-sourced annotation and vetting of the documents it obtains. If you spot an error on Wikipedia, you can fix it, but WikiLeaks does not allow for that kind of collaborative fact-checking.

That the site was originally intended to function more like a crowd-sourced, wiki platform was suggested by the Wikipedia-like annotation that accompanied the very first document uploaded by WikiLeaks in 2006. (Although it was described as a “leak,” that document — an order from an Islamist rebel leader in Somalia that the site’s editors could not verify as authentic — was not provided by a whistleblower, but stolen from Chinese hackers by a WikiLeaks activist who intercepted traffic flowing through a Tor network server he owned.)

Since the crowd-sourced aspect of WikiLeaks proved difficult to implement, and the site no longer relies mainly on collaborations with news organizations to vet and make sense of the vast troves of documents it obtains, Assange has, over time, taken on the role of the organization’s main analyst. Before the advent of Twitter, analysis and annotation written by Assange and his volunteers filled a section of the WikiLeaks website. Lately, though, most of the interpretation of the documents has been done only in short bursts on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, where the site’s founder draws attention to items he thinks are important, and tries to provide some context and analysis.

The micro-blogging format has obvious limits, however, when it comes to making complex annotations. The generally hostile tone of the WikiLeaks Twitter feed in response to even well-intentioned efforts to fact-check the group’s work has also severely hampered the project’s ability to use crowd-sourcing to properly annotate and vet the documents it posts. (I know this from first-hand experience, having been denounced by @wikileaks last month for pointing to a factual error in one of the group’s tweets about a DNC email.)

This criticism might seem like a narrow, technical objection — and it is certainly the case that journalists independently continue to help verify and interpret the most significant documents Assange publishes — but WikiLeaks’ lack of scrutiny of the documents it obtains, and its founder’s hostility to constructive criticism from outsiders, could be a significant problem if it is ever duped into publishing a forgery.

What if, as the cybersecurity consultant Matt Tait asked last month in relation to the DNC emails, a source — like, say, a hacker working for a Russian intelligence agency — provided WikiLeaks with a cache of documents that was tampered with in order to smear a political candidate?

In a post on the blog Lawfare, Tait explained that he had spent some time looking through the DNC files for any signs of a fake email planted among the genuine ones:

The metadata analysis I did on the leaked documents that day was almost by accident. I was actually looking for evidence of something much more frightening and which still keeps me up at night: What if the documents were mostly real, but had been surgically doctored? How effective would a carefully planted paragraph in an otherwise valid document be at derailing a campaign? How easily could Russia remove or sidestep an inconvenient DNC official with a single doctored paragraph showing “proof” of dishonest, unethical or illegal practices? And how little credibility would the sheepish official have in asserting that “all of the rest of the emails are true, but just not the one paragraph or email that makes me look bad?”

WikiLeaks is justly proud of its record to date of not being duped by forgers.

“The materials that we release are pristine,” Assange told Bill Maher on Friday. “We’re really good at this, we have a ten-year perfect record of having never got it wrong in relation to the integrity of what we’ve released.”

Still, given that WikiLeaks is now unwilling or unable to closely scrutinize all of the documents it obtains, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where something like this could occur — and that possibility itself serves to diminish the group’s credibility as a source of unvarnished truth.

Even so, for an organization so wounded by official persecution, it remains capable of inflicting remarkable damage. Although the DNC leaks have so far failed to derail Clinton’s campaign, Assange has hinted in recent interviews that he has more material on the candidate that he plans to release soon. While it is unclear why Assange would hold on to any secrets that might torpedo Clinton, if he has something like that, the fear of a WikiLeaks-powered October surprise must still haunt the dreams of her advisors.

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