My name is Micah Lee, and I am Director of Information Security at The Intercept.
I’m writing to you today to tell you about one of the most daunting and exciting projects we’ve ever taken on — and to ask for your help.
As you may have already heard, The Intercept recently came into possession of a massive trove of hacked data taken from inside Russian government agencies and corporations.
These files have the potential to expose countless secrets about Vladimir Putin’s regime. But there’s a problem: There’s simply no way anyone could sit down and read the contents of these tens of millions of files in any reasonable amount of time. There’s simply too much to go through.
So as the top “data/tech guy” at The Intercept, it’s my responsibility to take these massive files and index them into something searchable that reporters and researchers can use. And this requires specialized technology, top data experts, and money.
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These leaks total more than 13.3 terabytes and reveal the private deliberations of state-owned media, the Russian central bank, and the world’s largest pipeline company. Some of them go back as far as 20 years and include millions of emails.
This is one of the largest hacks our team has ever seen, and I’m proud that we’re making the documents available to partner organizations and journalists around the globe so we can team up on this massive reporting project.
I can’t think of a better news organization to do this kind of deep-dive investigative journalism, and so we will need to step up and lead the way.
This is an expense we never could’ve foreseen before Putin’s invasion, and it’s already cost us more than $35,000 in server costs alone. But we’re still early in what could be yearslong effort.
Thank you,
