A Third Party Breached The Intercept’s Signal Tip Line and Has Been Soliciting Whistleblowers

The way The Intercept handled the situation is unacceptable. I would not trust them at this point. Look at what happened to Reality Winner and other whistleblowers who trusted them. Rolling Stone – 24 Nov 21 'Bitter,' 'Angry,' 'Enraged': Reality Winner Blasts the Intercept After 4... After years locked away for leaking classified information on Russian interference, Reality Winner unloads on what went wrong Archived link: CONTEXT: Winner was just 25 years old when she printed a single classified document — one that described Russian military efforts to spear-phish dozens of local election officials ahead of the 2016 election — smuggled it out of the NSA facility where she worked and mailed it to The Intercept . (For comparison, Edward Snowden provided at least 10,000 documents to, among others, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who later went on to co-found The Intercept . The NSA has claimed he took more than 1.7 million files.) Winner was ultimately sentenced to sixty-three months in prison for the leak, the longest prison term ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media. HOW THE INTERCEPT FAILED A WHISTLEBLOWER: The Intercept was widely criticized for its handling of the document Winner leaked—in particular, the decision to show the leaked document to the U.S. government. While attempting to verify its authenticity with the NSA, an Intercept reporter inadvertently revealed its provenance. According to an FBI affidavit , the document had a telltale crease in it, indicating it had been printed and folded. An FBI agent assigned to the case would later testify that a total of six people had printed the document. The pool of potential leakers was further narrowed to one — Winner — when investigators discovered she’d emailed The Intercept from her work computer. The Intercept would go on to conduct an internal review, which found that, in Winner’s case, its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves” when it came to protecting sources After her arrest, First Look Media, which owns The Intercept , pledged to support Winner’s legal defense, but Winner says that support stopped shortly after her sentencing in August 2018. THE INTERCEPT FAILED OTHER WHISTLEBLOWERS: “I wasn’t the first source that they burned and I definitely wasn’t the last — two other people have done prison time [due to] them being extremely sloppy,” Winner says, referring to Daniel Hale, sentenced to 45 months in prison earlier this year after he pled guilty to leaking documents about the U.S. military’s drone program, and Terry Albury, sentenced in 2018 to four years in prison after leaking documents concerning the bureau’s use of informants. “Every time one of their sources goes to prison, that’s another headline for them. That’s how they stay relevant — by burning sources, instead of the journalism that they once believed in.”