Section: The Intercept (USA)
The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most...
How Social Media Is Leveling the Playing Field Between Governments, Militants, and Ordinary People
Decades before smartphones, the internet, and social media, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who worked on media theory, predicted a future world war fought using information. While World War I and World War II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between military...
With U.S. Backing, Ukraine Pushes to Privatize Paris Climate Agreement
Like most documents that travel through U.N. channels, a recent proposal from Ukrainian diplomats is blanketed in jargon and buzzwords, promising to render things “integrated, holistic and balanced” and to promote “ambition.” But this proposal — brought by the Ukrainian negotiating team to this year’s U.N. Framework Convention on Climate...
CIA Director Met Advocate of Disputed DNC Hack Theory — at Trump’s Request
CIA Director Mike Pompeo met late last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who has become an advocate for a disputed theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence. Pompeo met on October 24 with William Binney,...
How Twitter Secretly Benefits From Bots And Fake Accounts
Twitter may have a fake accounts scandal on its hands. And it’s remarkably similar to the scandal that rocked Wells Fargo last year. Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, described to Bloomberg on Friday how he uncovered a trove of spam accounts with IP addresses from Russia and Ukraine in 2015. He recommended deletion, but...
Moscow Mueller: What the Indictments and Plea Agreements Mean for Donald Trump
This week, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller revealed the opening blows in his investigation into potential collusion between members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and operatives working for or on behalf of Russia. On Monday, things kicked off with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort turning himself in to the...
YouTube and Facebook Are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases Against War Criminals
Abdulsalam was in the middle of Friday prayer at his neighborhood mosque in al-Bab, Aleppo, when he heard a crash — a nearby bakery had just disintegrated under the force of a barrel bomb, a deadly metal container filled with shrapnel and explosives, favored by the Syrian military. Scanning the sky he saw the hovering chopper that had dropped the...
Paul Manafort’s Alleged Money-Laundering Scheme Was Exposed Months Ago
The charges against Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his protégé Rick Gates, the first in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation, primarily involve laundering money earned in Ukraine without paying taxes or registering as a foreign lobbyist. A main conduit for moving these funds from offshore companies to the...
Mueller: Trump Campaign Adviser George Papadopoulos Hunted for “Dirt” in “Thousands of Emails”
A former adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign secretly pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with representatives of the Russian government during the campaign. According to court documents unsealed Monday, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s campaign, confessed to repeatedly attempting to...
After Charlottesville, The American Far Right Is Tearing Itself Apart
When white nationalist Richard Spencer coined the term “alt-right” nearly a decade ago, his movement was marginal, impotent, and striving for respectability. The phrase was a useful euphemism for his genocidal ideology, a palatable alternative to “the Ku Klux Klan” or “the American Nazi Party” to go with his suit, tie, and military undercut. In...
