Feature podcast: Alexa O'Brien on Wikileaks, intelligence and influence

This podcast is brought to you by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Foundation funds a lot of interesting people and work in the cybersecurity space and they’re supporting this special podcast series examining topics of interest to cyber policy makers. In this podcast we’re going to hear from Alexa O’Brien. She’s currently studying a Masters in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown University. She’s also working on an ethical framework for the applied intelligence discipline – collection, analysis and the like – for media practitioners. Alexa is also a journalist. Her most recent major work is a July 2019 analysis of the US media’s coverage of civilian harm in the war against ISIS, I’ve linked through to that in the show notes below. Before she worked as an established journalist, Alexa covered Chelsea Manning’s trial at Fort Meade on her blog. Her transcript of the proceedings were a tremendous help to the wider media, and it was this work that briefly pulled her into the Wikileaks “scene”. It wasn’t a good fit. Alexa joined me for this freewheeling discussion about intelligence, ethics, moral authority and signs that not everything is as it seems in the Wikileaks universe.