Glenn Greenwald's new website launches with fresh NSA revelations

A new website featuring journalist Glenn Greenwald and funded by the billionaire founder of eBay was unveiled early Monday, with two stories about US government surveillance.

The site, called the Intercept, reported Monday that the National Security Agency has used cell phone geolocation to help pinpoint targets for US drone strikes overseas, and published previously unseen photographs of major US intelligence facilities.

The Intercept is part of a suite of planned sites to be published by First Look media, founded by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar. Its editors are Greenwald and fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

The Intercept will focus on reporting based on documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the site’s editors said in an introductory statement. “Our focus in this very initial stage will be overwhelmingly on the NSA story,” the statement said.

The involvement of the NSA in the drone program was previously reported, based on information found in the Snowden documents. However, the Intercept story, written by Scahill and Greenwald, appears to add significant new sourcing from inside the drone program itself, citing an unnamed “former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA.”

The story quotes the former operator as saying that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed in strikes based on geolocation techniques that can find a mobile phone but cannot verify who is holding it.

The NSA declined to respond to questions for the article, the Intercept said.

The editors accelerated the launch of the site, their statement said, to fight intensifying attacks on journalists working on stories about government surveillance and other secret programs. Director of national intelligence James Clapper told Congress last month that Snowden had committed a crime and had “accomplices,” in a reference widely interpreted as threatening to journalists working on stories based on the Snowden documents.

Congressman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House intelligence committee, last week called Greenwald “a thief.”

“None of this will deter the journalism we are doing,” the editors’ statement said. “A primary function of the Intercept is to insist upon and defend our press freedoms from those who wish to infringe them.”

Further plans for the site include a column by Greenwald, who previously wrote for the Guardian.