In the first exposé for their new new venture, First Look Media's digital journal The Intercept, investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald reveal the National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes.
In a Democracy Now! exclusive interview, Scahill and Greenwald explain the story just hours it was published.
The NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies, an unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent and unidentified people. The United States has reportedly carried out drone strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.
The Associated Press is reporting the White House is considering using a drone to kill an American citizen who is a allegedly a member of al-Qaida. The AP did not name the man or the country where he is residing. The Obama administration has killed four U.S. citizens in drone strikes since 2009, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his son in separate strikes in Yemen. We ask Scahill and Greenwald to comment on this story.
The mission of First Look Media is "fearless, adversarial journalism." We ask the duo about their new venture with filmmaker Laura Poitras, started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. "We are really about a journalistic ethos -- which is not doing things like helping the U.S. continue its targeting of U.S. citizens for death, but by being adversarial to the government," Greenwald says. "Telling the public what it ought to know, and targeting the most powerful corporate factions with accountability journalism."
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