Open Access To The Snowden Archive

Emulating the Panama Papers Archive, Edward Snowden and The Intercept Magazine have made a searchable archive of the secret documents he illegally exfiltrated from the NSA while working there.

The Intercept is announcing two innovations in how they report on and publish these materials. Both measures are designed to ensure that reporting on the archive continues in as expeditious and informative a manner as possible, in accordance with the agreements entered into with Snowden about how these materials would be disclosed.

The first measure involves the publication of large batches of documents.

They will begin publishing installments of the NSA’s internal SIDtoday newsletters, which span more than a decade beginning after 9/11. We are starting with the oldest SIDtoday articles, from 2003, and working through the most recent in our archive, from 2012. The first release today contains 166 documents, all from 2003, and they will periodically release batches until the entire set is made public. 

The documents are available on a special section of The Intercept.The SIDtoday documents run a wide gamut: from serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts’ trips and vacations, with much in between. Many are self-serving and boastful, designed to justify budgets or impress supervisors. Others contain obvious errors or mindless parroting of public source material. But some SIDtoday articles have been the basis of significant revelations from the archive.

Accompanying the release of these documents are summaries of the content of each, along with a story about NSA’s role in Guantánamo interrogations, a lengthy roundup of other intriguing information gleaned from these files, and a profile of SIDtoday. Journalists, researchers, and interested parties are invited to comb through these documents, along with future published batches, to find additional material of interest. 

Intercept editors and reporters have carefully examined each document, redacted names of low-level functionaries and other information that could impose serious harm on innocent individuals, and given the NSA an opportunity to comment on the documents to be published (the NSA’s comments resulted in no redactions other than two names of relatively low-level employees. The Intercept say these releases will enhance public understanding of these extremely powerful and secretive surveillance agencies.

The second innovation is to invite outside journalists, including from foreign media outlets, to work with The Intercept to explore the full Snowden archive.

So far, The Intercept has shared documents with more than two dozen media outlets, and teams of journalists in numerous countries have thus worked with and reported on Snowden documents (that’s independent of the other media outlets which have long possessed large portions of the Snowden archive, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Guardian, ProPublica). 

The Intercept say there are still many documents of legitimate public interest that should be disclosed. There are also documents in the archive they do not think should be published because of the severe harm they would cause innocent people (e.g., private communications intercepted by NSA, the disclosure of which would destroy privacy rights; and documents containing government speculation about bad acts committed by private individuals (typically from marginalized communities), the disclosure of which would permanently destroy reputations).

An archive of this significance and size obviously presents complicated questions about how best to report on it. The Intercept claim they have navigated these difficult and sometimes conflicting values in deciding how best to report on this massive archive. 

Intercept: http://bit.ly/1Uhf8EM