The Intercept is an American left-wing and progressive nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts online. The Intercept has published in English since its founding in 2014, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition. It has been noted for its pro-Palestinian coverage.
History
2014–2022: Founding, early years The Intercept was founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. It was launched on February 10, 2014, by First Look Media with $250 million in pledged funding by billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. The publication initially reported on documents released by Edward Snowden. Co-founders Greenwald and Poitras left in 2020 amid public disagreements about the leadership and direction of the organization.
A Brazilian version of the site, Intercept Brasil, launched in August 2016. The site featured both original reporting in Portuguese as well as features from the main Intercept site translated into Portuguese. The newsrooms for The Intercept and its Brazilian counterpart were editorially independent. In 2019, Intercept Brasil published Vaza Jato ("Car Wash Leaks"), messages demonstrating collaboration on illegal acts among former judge Sergio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, and others as part of Operation Car Wash. Intercept Brasil spun off as an independent organization in October 2022.
Resignation of Glenn Greenwald On October29, 2020, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, saying that he faced political censorship and contractual breaches from the editors, who he wrote had prevented publication of his "The Real Scandal: U.S. Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter's Emails" article on coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy; Greenwald pivoted to Substack to publish it independently. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Greenwald stated that he thinks his colleagues did not want to report anything negative about Joe Biden because they were desperate for Trump to lose. The Intercept disputed Greenwald's accusations, writing, without evidence, that he "believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor", and told The Washington Post, "it is absolutely not true that Glenn Greenwald was asked to remove all sections critical of Joe Biden from his article. He was asked to support his claims and innuendo about corrupt actions by Joe Biden with evidence." Greenwald published his email exchange with The Intercept, which, he said, showed his article on Joe Biden was censored and refuted the claims above.
2023–present: Independent organization In January 2023, The Intercept was spun off from the First Look Institute (the nonprofit arm of First Look Media) as an independent nonprofit organization. Reporting from The Intercept exposed significant sourcing issues with the influential December 2023 New York Times article "Screams Without Words", which alleged that Hamas perpetrated systematic sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. The investigation demonstrated how two inexperienced freelancers in Israel had done the majority of reporting work for the New York Times story, raising concerns about its editorial process and credibility. In follow-up reporting, The Intercept confirmed that The New York Times had withheld an episode of its podcast The Daily related to "Screams Without Words" due to internal debate about the veracity of the publication's original reporting. In February 2024, The New York Times began an internal investigation into the source of leaks to The Intercept.
In February 2024, The Intercept laid off 16 staff members, one-third of its newsroom. In April 2024 the outlet fired William Arkin, and Ken Klippenstein resigned in protest. Later that month, Semafor reported that The Intercept was running out of money "and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control".
In February 2024, The Intercept filed a lawsuit against OpenAI regarding the unauthorized use of journalists' work to train ChatGPT. The lawsuit focused on a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) not previously explored in the legal disputes between news organizations and AI companies. One year later, a federal court upheld part of the suit and overruled OpenAI's attempt to dismiss the case, though claims against Microsoft were dismissed. The ruling demonstrated that the DMCA can provide protections for news organizations against AI companies' unauthorized use of digital content, regardless of whether that content has been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
In June 2024, the unionized staff of The Intercept asked the group's board of directors to terminate the organization's CEO Annie Chabel and Chief Strategy Officer Sumi Aggarwal, commit to restructuring the business, and provide transparency into conversations with donors. The next month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim left The Intercept to found their own news website, Drop Site News, with some funding at launch from The Intercept. The Intercept continued to publish the Intercepted and Deconstructed podcasts.
In February 2025, The Intercept published Elon Musk's government email address, which had not been previously reported, and filed more than a dozen related Freedom of Information Act requests. The Intercept reported on a bill introduced in September 2025 that would give the Secretary of State power to revoke the passport of a U.S. citizen based on their beliefs or speech. Within days, public outrage led Rep. Brian Mast, who had introduced the bill, to backtrack on the proposal. That same month, The Intercept was the first news organization to report that the U.S. attacked an alleged drug boat multiple times, known as a double tap strike, in order to kill survivors of its first attack. In November 2025, The Intercept reported that in response to U.S. Department of State sanctions, YouTube had deleted more than 700 videos from three major Palestinian human rights organizations documenting alleged human rights violations by Israel.
In late 2025, The Intercept was among the first outlets to detail the case of a retired police officer in Tennessee who was jailed for more than a month because of a meme he posted on Facebook in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. An investigation by The Intercept found no evidence that anyone in the public had expressed concern about danger in response to the meme, contradicting the claims of the county sheriff whose office arrested the man. The story drew widespread attention; within a week, the man was released and charges were dropped.
In March 2026, NYC Health + Hospitals canceled a contract with Palantir following reporting from The Intercept sharing details of the contract and showing almost $4 million in payments since November 2023.
Activities
Edward Snowden reporting and archives In its early years, The Intercept published extensive investigations on the Snowden disclosures' revelations about surveillance activity in the U.S. and globally. In March 2014, Der Spiegel and The Intercept jointly reported on a list of world leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, subject to U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. Five months later, The Intercept shared details on ICREACH, the NSA's search engine giving access to hundreds of millions of records about both American citizens and non-Americans to 23 U.S. governmental agencies, including the CIA and FBI.
In July 2014, The Intercept reported how the British spy agency Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) was covertly manipulating internet content and activity with tactics like artificially increasing website traffic and interfering with online polls. The Intercept also alleged that GCHQ used Regin malware in cyberattacks on Belgacom and other EU computer systems. In February 2015, The Intercept reported that the NSA and GCHQ had hacked French-Dutch digital security company Gemalto in order to surveil calls and data secretly, an apparent violation of international law. A follow-up in June 2015 detailed how GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group worked to discredit specific targets online through the use of impersonation, fake websites, YouTube videos, and other tools. A story in September 2015 covered Karma Police, GCHQ's surveillance program established seven years earlier to record the search, browsing, and chat activities of every internet user with the goal of identifying patterns and relationships rather than targeting specific users.
The Intercept had hosted an archive of documents leaked by Snowden to Greenwald and Poitras. First Look deprecated the archive and laid off its associated research team in 2019, saying that their editorial priorities had changed and that they no longer reported from the archive. This marked the end of The Intercept original vision of being a platform to report on the NSA disclosures. Barrett Brown burned the National Magazine Award he had received for his Intercept column in protest of First Look's decision to offline the Snowden archives.
Podcasts
Intercepted
Intercepted was a weekly podcast hosted by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and produced by First Look Media. Intercepted was launched on January 25, 2017. It regularly featured The Intercept editor and journalist Glenn Greenwald as well as senior correspondent, author, and journalist Naomi Klein. The editor-in-chief was Betsy Reed. Music for the show was created and performed by DJ Spooky. The last episode was July 3, 2024. It was replaced by The Intercept Briefing.
The premiere episode, on January 25, 2017, "The Clock Strikes Thirteen, Donald Trump is President" featured an interview with Seymour Hersh, who criticizes the media's response to the alleged Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling the way the media went along with the story, "outrageous".
Deconstructed Deconstructed is a podcast hosted by The Intercepts Washington, D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim. The show was previously hosted by British political journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan for its first two years, from 2018 to 2020. Grim took over as permanent host in October 2020 when Hasan began hosting a news broadcast for Peacock.
Somebody
Somebody is a seven-part investigative podcast about what happened to Courtney Copeland, a gunshot victim who died after being found outside a Chicago Police station. Copeland's mother, Shapearl Wells, narrates the podcast, released in 2020.
Intercept Brasil In August 2016, The Intercept launched a Brazilian version, The Intercept Brasil (later renamed Intercept Brasil). In June 2019, Intercept Brasil released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between judge Sergio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and other Operation Car Wash prosecutors. In the wake of the reporting, the Brazilian government in January 2020 indicted Glenn Greenwald on cybercrime charges in connection with his efforts to protect his sources, the legitimacy of President Jair Bolsonaro's election was called into question, and the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in April–June 2021 annulled former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 2018 conviction on corruption charges.
Some suspect that Intercept Brasil is funded by the criminal organization Primeiro Comando da Capital based on a citation of "The Intercept Brasil" on an accountability for the PCC found in the Operation Sequaz, Intercept Brasil denies those claims.
Juan M. Thompson scandal