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What happened to the Snowden archive
- cocodill 14d agoIf you leak it, leak it everywhere!
- Barbing 14d agoIIRC he tried to find people he could trust to redact in a way that would protect US national security interests.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoAnd yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population. (although of late my surprise is decreasing).
- anotherhue 14d agoI think the real answer is the Overton window shifted to accommodate what was previously scandalous,
- motionlessveloc 14d agoThis is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help. All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
- fantasizr 14d agothats the tough thing about investigative journalism / whistleblowers. You have to hope there's an audience who will care.
- rightnutwingjob 14d agoPlenty of people care. Empathy is, after all, free. Action has a price.
- rexpop 14d agoIt's a figure of speech. It's short for "care enough to to take action."
- nostrademons 14d agoOverton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway. We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
- djhn 14d agoYour comment started out well within the Overton window, but in the second paragraph it jumped out. Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
- nostrademons 14d agoI like that terminology. I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others. History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
- ericyd 14d ago[flagged]
- jdiff 14d agoIt's really never been the worst thing. From MKUltra to Operation Sea-Spray and many, many more.
- all2 14d agoThose are all conspiracy theories. ;)
- DubiousPusher 14d agoWhat? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.
- esseph 14d agoThey are saying it tongue-in-cheek, and even added an emoji for additional emphasis of that point.
- c0nducktr 14d agoI'm assuming the winking emoji was used to indicate sarcasm.
- DubiousPusher 14d agodoh!
- riddley 14d agoNeither of those are theories. Both are well documented and have had public hearings and governmental disclosure.
- joe_the_user 14d agoThe Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians"). "The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses." Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids
- yeah879846 14d ago[dead]
- bflesch 14d agoIn 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.
- iamnothere 14d agoBe afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
- Forgeties79 14d agoThat’s a gross misrepresentation of their point.
- fn-mote 14d agoI read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is. Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense. What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
- godwinson__4-8 14d agoThey are talking about tradeoffs. It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades. The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves. None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
- AlexCoventry 14d ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoGiven what he does in public, I'm not sure there's any limit to what they're all doing in private. Buy stocks in paper-shredder companies.
- pluc 14d agoEh, the outrage never really materialized into anything worth continuing the leaks. Look at the Epstein files. "They" can just wait it out.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoThe banality of the day after outrage.
- tasty_freeze 14d agoJD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoBoth. The first part because the second part.
- harry8 14d ago[flagged]
- iamnothere 14d agoEpstein was primarily a money man, but you’ll notice that this gets zero coverage. I guarantee there’s a lot of serious dirt there that will never see the light of day. It’s almost better for the people involved if the public keeps focusing on the most outrageous aspects of the story. (And it is quite outrageous, and terrible, to be fair.)
- joe_the_user 14d agoThis more than some cia/mossad front of blackmailing the powerful with horrific acts done to children. IDK, the CIA/mossad pedophile part seems significant. I don't think ordinary people upset at young girls being exploited for the purpose of blackmailing people are being 'naive' or something. Sure, it all pales in comparison to genocide X foreign land but people getting riled by that stuff too.
- Arodex 14d ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoThe 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.
- iamnothere 14d agoNot just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers. Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
- Arainach 14d ago> Greenwald had to shift to alt media Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
- starkd 14d agoOr maybe he just realized that politics is just one big club and he ain't in it. And neither are the people.
- iamnothere 14d agoHis politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
- 14d ago
- johnnyApplePRNG 14d ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 14d ago> You seriously believe he's still just happily living in Russia? Today? I mean, Bashar al-Assad is. If he can escape thousands of highly-motivated revenge campaigns to see him strung up like Gadaffi, I can believe in Snowden sipping tea from his dacha.
- johnnyApplePRNG 14d agoSnowden promotes zcash and distrusts monero. If that's not enough proof that he's a government plant, I don't know what else to tell you.
- DubiousPusher 14d agoLiving? Probably. Happily? Probably not.
- rtpg 14d agoThis 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. [0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/ https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/
- ktallett 14d agoWhy does it post the Intercept in a bad light?
- ekjhgkejhgk 14d agoThe Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this: > On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value". Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops. > In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents. ( ... ) > The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
- Coeur 14d agoSnowden 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.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoTherefore there should be no harm in releasing it.
- NamTaf 14d agoThat doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example. The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoYou are correct of course. Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
- regnull 14d ago[flagged]
- wolvoleo 14d agoDid he even have access to Russian intelligence? Also, at some point they were just done reporting on what was there. Remember that Snowden got three journalists involved so they could make a decision on what to release, so they didn't expose details of people undercover etc and put real lives in danger. It was not meant to go to the public in its entirety.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoThere seems to be a lot of continued misunderstanding how Snowden managed to end up in Russia. > On June 22, 2013, 18 days after the publication of Snowden's NSA documents began, officials revoked his US passport.[205] On June 23, Snowden boarded a commercial Aeroflot flight, SU213, to Moscow, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, with an intended final destination of Ecuador arranged in an Ecuadorian emergency travel document that Snowden had acquired. However, Snowden became initially stranded in Russia upon his landing in Moscow when his US passport was revoked[0] It's the US' fault that he ended up in Russia. That's the irony. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the...
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- firesteelrain 14d agoPeople 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
- anonym29 14d agoHe didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
- firesteelrain 14d agoHe actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already. He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he. But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
- BLKNSLVR 14d ago> I am still a citizen and so was he. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
- firesteelrain 14d agoI get it I didn’t leak national security information but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t stateless. That’s the part I was referring to
- WarOnPrivacy 14d agoBesides the undisclosed portions of the Snowden archives, I was also disappointed that the Assange/Wikileaks insurance files were never decrypted. ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance+torrent https://kagi.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance+torrent
- kiproping 13d agoI was also thinking about this. Did Snowden share his files with Wikileaks? Do the insurance files partly contain the Snowden files. Actually does Snowden himself have access to the files?
- TiredOfLife 13d agoThose insurance files were probably as real as the supposed russian files they newer released.
- motionlessveloc 14d agoSo 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.)
- BLKNSLVR 14d ago> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow [0] Also, please refer to a reply to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990 [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong
- 0110101001 14d agoBecause I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution. We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
- whatshisface 14d agoPeople with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoHis autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty! I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
- phendrenad2 14d ago"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.
- StanislavPetrov 14d ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 14d agoThought experiment: Is war of the scale of WWI and WWII a cleansing of, and temporary innoculation against, the natural tribalist fracturing of human psychology that occurs in times of peace? ("Peace is war" and all that goes along with that). Does the insanity just continue until some traumatic event shocks (what remains of) the world population into a relatively normalised, shared worldview? Until enough time has passed that the cracks start to reappear. Feels to me like a pattern in nature. I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.
- StanislavPetrov 14d agoI think tribalism is inherent in humans, as we our species evolved in a tribal fashion. It is also certain that billions and billions of dollars have been invested by the CIA (and their equivalent in other countries) to perfect propaganda techniques by taking advantage of the tribal instincts (among other things). >I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version. Couldn't agree more. The more insular a group is, the more severe the tribalism is. The bifurcation of information sources has certainly added to this. If the people in your tribe all listen to the same networks and sources of information, and all of the people in the other tribe listen to entirely different networks and sources of information, you end up with people that have very little sense of shared reality. Any dissension from tribal dogma very quickly renders someone a heretic or an outcast. This is also what makes tribalism so powerful as a propaganda tool. The dehumanization and "othering" of a person, or a group, or a country renders them intrinsically evil and worthy of attack by the tribe. Which in my opinion is the real danger of so-called AI. We've already seen what happens when people outsource their judgement and critical thinking to media and government institutions. When the masses outsource their judgement and critical thinking to a glorified autocomplete that is programmed with "weights" by those with an agenda, the masses will believe whatever is spit out by this machine and act accordingly.
- corndoge 14d agoThe 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.
- octoberfranklin 14d agoPeople don't care about things unless/until they become part of the Omnicause.
- mitxela 14d agoWhat's that?
- pjc50 14d agoThis is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else. This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.
- mitxela 14d agoI still don't understand what the comment means.
- Quothling 14d agoWho are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg. The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
- jheriko 14d ago[dead]
- glitchc 14d ago[flagged]
- tupapiur77756 14d ago[flagged]
- BoggleOhYeah 14d agoIt 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.
- ktallett 14d agoHad he stayed in the US whatever could he have done? The US are not known for their ability to accept wrongdoing.
- BoggleOhYeah 13d agoIt certainly would have kept the leaks in the news cycle for much longer and not delegitimized his motives. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would have had any real effect on policy.
- sensanaty 14d agoIf he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
- BoggleOhYeah 13d agoI doubt he could have been disappeared after all of the attention. Chelsea Manning wasn’t disappeared despite causing a similar black eye for the US government. I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone. That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- malomalsky 14d ago[dead]
- sriramraja251 14d agoThe 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.
- ivolimmen 14d agoMy 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.
- ak39 14d agoUsing FF here, no such warning on my side. Likely your ISP?
- jeroenhd 14d agoNothing here on two different connections. Your ISP/DNS provider seems to be interfering. You can try this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260921054500/https://libroot.org/posts/what-happened-to-the-snowden-archive https://web.archive.org/web/20260921054500/https://libroot.o...
- ivolimmen 14d agoThanks that works
- mclaus_archive 14d ago[flagged]
- robinsinclair 14d ago[dead]
- 21asdffdsa12 14d agoand 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.
- tancop 14d agoI 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.
- jasonvorhe 14d agoI think it's quite obvious that journalism is mostly PR for the current things in politics by now. It probably died around 2020 at the latest.
- cucumber3732842 14d agoMore like died around 1920, if it was ever alive. The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.
- cindyllm 14d ago[dead]
- pjc50 14d agoI can give you an exact date: 16 October 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
- XajniN 14d agoWas that the first time a journalist was assassinated?
- Traster 14d agoIn 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.
- irthomasthomas 13d agoExcept for all the exceptions, which are many, like the Jack the Ripper police files which where denied to the public.
- throwaway85825 13d agoThey're just hiding misconduct because the government does an enormous number of things that would be national scandals if they weren't allowed to bury them.
- segmondy 13d ago100 years?
- majkinetor 13d agoIn current age there is no reason for Snowden not to do this: 1. Use all variants of local AI to categorize documents and remove PII. Different AI's can be used to doublecheck results 2. Publish output as a torrent Then wider community can find whatever patterns exist there.
- righthand 14d ago“The Media” is a bunch of diaper wearing cowards that capitulate to the feds. Plain and simple.
- ivolimmen 14d agoApart 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)
- craniumjello 14d agoNobody cares. Or too stupid. Even genius here.
- marysol5 13d agoThe "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.
- 31337Logic 13d agoThis is so important. Thanks for reviving this, and all the other work that you do!!
- farceSpherule 13d ago[dead]
- sc68cal 13d agoThis 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.
- RankingMember 13d agoMy hopeful side sees a future where he's pardoned and can live here as a hero.
- jLaForest 13d agoSomething tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
- cm2012 13d agoHe may have lost that opportunity when he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically, in a dictatorial police state.
- jra_samba 13d agoSnowden did not take refuge in Russia. He was trapped there when his passport was cancelled by the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...
- cm2012 13d agoHe still accepted their asylum rather than voluntarily going back to the us. His original intention does not exculpate him.
- tonymet 13d agoWhile 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.
- tonymet 13d ago* and I don’t remember Snowden presenting evidence that NSA (et al) had the datacenter / compute capacity to surveil these targets. Even a fraction of the target traffic (3+ wireless carriers, dozens of messaging email software firms) would require a fraction of their datacenter capacity to sniff, trace, index, analyze . Was that capacity presented in the archive?
- mixmastamyk 13d agoHe was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.
- tonymet 13d agoSQL alone is just a query language. the MySQL design docs Snowden shared were primitive installations that did not meet the claimed capability of their surveillance system.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 13d agoSomeone should ask Russian citizen Ed Snowden.
- kleiba2 13d agoRelated: what happened to Snowden?
- garganzol 13d agoMen in black: it never existed... BLITZ!
- freebsd_lovefes 13d agoSnowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.
- baist0 13d agoI wish I had the Millennium Falcon to fly off this fucking planet.