High-stakes reporting like the Pulitzer Prize-winning NSA exclusives by Glenn Greenwald and others requires a great deal of security. Sources have to be protected at all costs, and valuable, classified documents like those leaked by Edward Snowden need to be kept out of the wrong hands. For First Look Media — the news organization behind publication The Intercept and led by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras — digital security is one man’s job. Micah Lee traveled to Greenwald’s home in Brazil to secure his computer, and he’s set up redundant encryption protocols to ensure that files and sources are kept safe. On top of it all, he uses his technology expertise to help reporters decode some of the more technical material in leaked NSA documents.
In early January, Micah Lee worried journalist Glenn Greenwald’s computer would get hacked, perhaps by the NSA, perhaps by foreign spies. Greenwald was a target, and he was vulnerable. He was among the first to receive tens of thousands of top secret NSA documents from former contractor Edward Snowden, a scoop that eventually helped win the most recent Pulitzer prize. Though Greenwald took precautions to handle the NSA documents securely, his computer could still be hacked. “Glenn isn’t a security person and he’s not a huge computer nerd,” Lee tells Mashable. “He is basically a normal computer user, and overall, normal computer users are vulnerable.” Lee, 28, is the technologist hired in November to make sure Greenwald and fellow First Look Media employees use state-of-the-art security measures when handling the NSA documents, or when exchanging emails and online chats with sensitive information. First Look was born in October 2013, after eBay founder Pierre Omydiar pledged to bankroll a new media website led by Greenwald, with documentary journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
