alt Hacker NewsWhat happened to the Snowden archive
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This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
I think the real answer is the Overton window shifted to accommodate what was previously scandalous,
In the UK we have the laws around how government documents of historical value go into the national archives after 20 years, documents with personal information are held longer (up to 100 years). I could see a good argument for the Snowden archive to be automatically decrypted and published after 100 years on a similar basis for it's historcial value.
I think the answer to what happened is really straight forward though - they published as much of it as they could, what they published is probably pretty representative of other stuff in the archives and there's no news value to publishing 100 variations of the same story. If they published 1% of the archive, but the other 99% is just a million details about the same basic decisions then I don't think it matters much. It's also a really slow and painful process to make sure you're protecting the identities of people.
Having said that, I could see some value in a team taking a privately hosted open source AI model, feeding into it the archive and any related news articles into it and asking it if there's anything newsworthy that we missed.
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
I don't get why they all try to protect it so much. Snowden's identity is already public so sharing the files can't hurt him. Just redact personal info and put it all out there.
A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.
They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Men in black: it never existed... BLITZ!
Apart from his news: if Snowden want to get out of exile and return to the US; the current administration can be bought. The next president will probably still wants to jail him (or worse)
Besides the undisclosed portions of the Snowden archives, I was also disappointed that the Assange/Wikileaks insurance files were never decrypted.
Related: what happened to Snowden?
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
While I respect Snowden and find many of the claims plausible much of the evidence and story didn’t add up. Here are a few doubts I have, and I’d like to see the rebuttal.
First, he seemed to embellish his role and authority at NSA. Based on his vernacular, and the artifacts that he presented, I believe he was an IT admin, who happened upon these files. His archive was predominantly design / spec docs with screenshots, rather than code artifacts (compiled code, 1st hand screenshots, configs). In his interviews he didn’t seem to have a deep technical grasp of the systems, and he was cagey about his areas of responsibility.
Second, XKeyScore and other system implementations seemed too primitive for the claimed capability. It was claimed they could google everyone’s email (or some large share of the population, let’s say 100-500m individuals, in real time), but the designs were primitive collegiate level , single-instance mySQL databases and CRUD UIs. I didn’t see any indications the system capability met the claims .
I’m not an expert, I’ve read No Place to Hide, watched some interviews, and used to follow him on Twitter.
I’d like to see how this community assessed him personally and the artifacts he shared.
Eh, the outrage never really materialized into anything worth continuing the leaks. Look at the Epstein files. "They" can just wait it out.
Someone should ask Russian citizen Ed Snowden.
I wish I had the Millennium Falcon to fly off this fucking planet.
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
This is so important. Thanks for reviving this, and all the other work that you do!!
The "Snowden Docs" were just a wget --mirror of the internal wiki. So there was a lot of cruft in there.
Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.
“The Media” is a bunch of diaper wearing cowards that capitulate to the feds. Plain and simple.
It was a mistake to flee the US and a bigger mistake to never return.
He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.
Nobody cares. Or too stupid. Even genius here.
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
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In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Snowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.
This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.