Journalist alleges phone data copied, sent to CIA during Assange interviews

Journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass alleged that their phone data was collected and sent to the CIA while they were visiting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, England, between January 2017 and March 2018.

The allegations were part of a 2022 suit that cited Fourth Amendment violations by the CIA and a private security company, and which was dismissed on Feb. 15, 2025, when the court ruled that the spy agency was protected by the state secrets privilege.

Assange, who was the target of a long-running case by the U.S. Department of Justice over charges he violated the Espionage Act, lived in the embassy from 2012 to 2019 after Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa granted him asylum from extradition to Sweden on a rape allegation.

Goetz and Glass sued the CIA in August 2022, along with two attorneys who had also visited Assange in 2017 and 2018. Goetz is an editor at German radio and TV broadcaster NDR; Glass is a freelancer and former correspondent for ABC News.

The suit accused former CIA Director Mike Pompeo of recruiting Spanish private security company Undercover Global to illegally collect information from Assange and his visitors at the embassy, beginning in January 2017 and ending when the Ecuadorian government terminated the company’s contract around April 2018.

The suit alleges that the plaintiffs were required to leave their electronic devices with an embassy security guard, and that the information on the devices — including personal photos, emails, texts and GPS data — was then copied and sent to the CIA.

It also claims that the journalists’ meetings with Assange were surreptitiously recorded, and that those recordings were sent to the CIA as well.

The plaintiffs asked the court to order the CIA and UC Global to delete their private communications.

In December 2023, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl dismissed the part of the suit related to the meeting recordings, ruling that the journalists’ expectation of privacy in their conversations with Assange was “unreasonable.”

And in February 2025, Koeltl dismissed the remaining claims related to seizure of their device data, agreeing with the CIA that confirming or denying whether it had seized the data “reasonably could be expected to cause serious—and in some cases, exceptionally grave—damage to the national security of the United States.”

Koeltl acknowledged the plaintiffs’ argument that the data seizure had already been reported on in the media and discussed in Spanish court proceedings against UC Global. But, he argued, public information can still be covered by state secrets privilege.

Neither the journalists nor their attorney responded to requests for comment.