Pierre Omidyar’s new venture, First Look Media, has its first online ‘magazine’ up and running. It’s called The Intercept. First big story is The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program.
It does go a little beyond what we already knew–that the US can use voice recognition to ID a cell phone user, then use geo-targeting to send a drone strike aimed at the phone–to discuss how the program works in practice (hint: not so great, especially once targets started adopting counter-measures).
I just read the bio’s of the contributors and it looks like a who’s who of left wing hacks from the Nation and Alternet. I was especially surprised (although not so much in retrospect) when I saw Peter Mass and Laura Poitras as two of the contributors. Mass wrote a rather hagiographic piece on Poitras for the NY Times a few months ago whitewashing her involvement in a deadly attack on US forces in Baghdad.