What Became of the Snowden Archive: Seven Years of Silence

The last document from Edward Snowden's archive was published on 29 May 2019 by The Intercept. Since then, no journalist, newsroom, or institution anywhere has released a single new page. By most estimates, roughly 1% of the archive was ever made public.

How the newsrooms went quiet

The retreat looks almost synchronised. The Guardian printed its last documents in February 2014, having published about 30 of the roughly 58,000 files it held. Der Spiegel stopped in January 2015; The New York Times and ProPublica in August of that year. After that only The Intercept kept publishing—until it closed its archive in March 2019.

The stated reasons diverge. Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill blamed declining readership and the fact that, at Snowden's request, the paper had confined itself to surveillance and dropped material on the wars. The NYT and ProPublica never explained themselves at all; they worked under conditions the Guardian had typed onto a single sheet of A4.

The Intercept's closure

The strangest story belongs to the outlet founded specifically to report the archive. Over eleven days in March 2019, management offered four different reasons for closing it: budget cuts; the archive's loss of value; a shift to other "editorial priorities"; and, finally, Glenn Greenwald's claim that the closure was a by-product of financial constraints "and, critically, of my intent to seek other partners." Seven years on, no such partner has been named.

Laura Poitras, a co-founder, objected: the research team cost 1.5% of the organisation's budget, even as it was raising spending and headcount. In 2021 Greenwald gave a fifth account—that "nobody wanted to close it," and that it happened because two colleagues disagreed.

"The documents have aged"

The central argument is that the remaining files had lost journalistic value with age. Yet the most recent material dates from April 2013—about six years old at the time of closure. In journalism, declassified documents decades older routinely anchor serious reporting.

Jacob Appelbaum, who worked on the archive, published previously unreported findings in his 2022 doctoral thesis—from a list of "compromised" chip vendors to the NSA joining IETF meetings to weaken protocols. Much remains unpublished, he argues, because the holders fear being branded disloyal or facing prosecution.

Who holds the copies

Full copies still rest with Greenwald and Poitras; a substantial portion with Barton Gellman. None of them is now bound by a budget, a board, or editors; all three have left their outlets. All three say the material matters: Poitras in 2022 called it an archive "of enormous historical significance," Greenwald in 2023 put it at "hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more." None of the three has published anything from it since May 2019.

Of more than twenty people and organisations contacted, two replied—and neither answered a single question of substance.

Source: Hacker News