Snowden Docs Becoming Available

The Intercept is opening up access to the Snowden archive

Starting today, the site will begin publishing internal NSA newsletters.

Nearly three years after Edward Snowden first exposed the NSA’s PRISM electronic data mining program, and his trusted journalist partners are finally ready to bring even more of those documents out into the open. Today, The Intercept announced two initiatives to further that goal: First, the site is releasing a cache of internal NSA documents that it believes will point other journalists towards noteworthy stories. And second, The Intercept will partner with other national and international media outlets to allow access to the sensitive documents in its possession.

For the first initiative, the site is publishing 166 documents from SIDtoday, the NSA’s internal newsletter that covered everything from “serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts’ trips and vacations,” according to The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald. Although they can occasionally seem trivial, Greenwald notes that the newsletters have been the source of “significant revelations in the past.” Moving forward, the site will periodically release new batches of SIDtoday newsletters with summaries of the content found in each, as they did with this story on the NSA’s involvement in Guantánamo interrogations.

While the second part of The Intercept’s announcement is less visible, the site says they have now navigated the tricky legal and security issues involved in allowing additional access to a wider range of publications of journalists. “We now feel comfortable that we can do so consistent with the responsibility demanded by these materials and our agreement with our source,” Greenwald writes. In addition to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian — all of which published the original batch of leaks — The Intercept claims it has already shared the documents with more than a dozen media outlets around the globe, thus ensuring local journalists can cover the stories that affect them directly.

from:    http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/16/the-intercept-is-opening-up-access-to-the-snowden-archive/#comments