Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

Speaking to Computer Weekly after we published new revelations from the Snowden archive, the Guardian’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Ewen MacAskill, explains why more of the Snowden trove is unlikely to see the light of day

By Stefania Maurizi

Published: 11 Oct 2023 10:30

Some 10 years after he flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, The Guardian’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Ewen MacAskill, talks to Computer Weekly about the Snowden files.

MacAskill was speaking after Computer Weekly revealed the first new facts to emerge from the Snowden files since the archive first made headlines in 2013.

The three new revelations have surfaced for the first time only thanks to a highly technical publication: a doctoral thesis authored by US investigative journalist and postdoctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum, as part of his degree in applied cryptography from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Their publication by Computer Weekly has revived the debate as to why the entire Snowden archive has never been published, considering that even after a decade the three revelations remain indisputably in the public interest, and it is reasonable to assume there are many others like them.

MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He told Computer Weekly that:

•     As far as he knows, a copy of the documents is still locked in the New York Times office. Although the files are in the New York Times office, The Guardian retains responsibility for them.
•     As to why the New York Times has not published them in a decade, MacAskill maintains “this is a complicated issue”. “There is, at the very least, a case to be made for keeping them for future generations of historians,” he said.
•     Why was only 1% of the Snowden archive published by the journalists who had full access to it? Ewen MacAskill replied: “The main reason for only a small percentage – though, given the mass of documents, 1% is still a lot – was diminishing interest.”

The Snowden archive allows exposing and documenting the rise of the mass-surveillance state, a serious threat to democracy. Have the journalists and media with access to the full archive done everything they can to expose this threat? That is the crux of the matter, because even in a democracy bad people can be elected who could use such unprecedented Orwellian control to crush any opposition. Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said: “As Snowden has put it, we’re a ‘turnkey tyranny’: in other words, turn a switch, and we could be a total police state.”

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continua qui: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366554957/Why-only-1-of-the-Snowden-Archive-will-ever-be-published