What happened to the Snowden archive (libroot.org)
476 points by EXHades 12 hours ago
tancop an hour ago
I 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.
Chris2048 2 minutes ago
> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
There's a difference between caring about NS, and letting the government dictate how to do so.
jasonvorhe an hour ago
I 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.
pjc50 40 minutes ago
I can give you an exact date: 16 October 2017.
cucumber3732842 42 minutes ago
More 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.
rtpg 11 hours ago
This 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.
ktallett 3 hours ago
Why does it post the Intercept in a bad light?
ekjhgkejhgk 3 hours ago
The 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."
hnhg an hour ago
anotherhue 12 hours ago
I think the real answer is the Overton window shifted to accommodate what was previously scandalous,
nostrademons 6 hours ago
Overton 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.
pjc50 an hour ago
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
ricksunny 4 hours ago
>We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming.
In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?
seer 3 hours ago
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
djhn 6 hours ago
Your comment started out well within the Overton window, but in the second paragraph it jumped out.
Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
nostrademons 6 hours ago
flir 2 hours ago
That's still a single window. Otherwise what are the radical, unthinkable positions between abhorrent, fine and moot?
(TL;DR: It's just a metaphor).
fantasizr 8 hours ago
thats the tough thing about investigative journalism / whistleblowers. You have to hope there's an audience who will care.
rightnutwingjob 6 hours ago
Plenty of people care.
Empathy is, after all, free.
Action has a price.
rexpop 6 hours ago
motionlessveloc 9 hours ago
This 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.
Traster 38 minutes ago
In 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.
ivolimmen 14 minutes ago
Apart 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)
firesteelrain 10 hours ago
People 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
unsungNovelty 8 hours ago
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
INTPenis an hour ago
That's how it looks at least. It's a good excuse if your goal was always to flee to Russia.
firesteelrain 8 hours ago
He could have returned to the US. He chose to exile in Russia. He was already fleeing. I posted a bunch about it below
maxbond 7 hours ago
unsungNovelty 8 hours ago
viktorcode 3 hours ago
Russians had a joke about him back then: "For the crimes against the US Snowden was sentenced to the life in Russia"
commandersaki 9 hours ago
I would say Snowden's legacy is the push to get HTTPS everywhere.
Lammy 8 hours ago
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
jeroenhd an hour ago
mitxela 3 hours ago
judge2020 7 hours ago
octoberfranklin 7 hours ago
So what? They have Cloudflare. "SSL removed here"
firesteelrain 9 hours ago
That’s true
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
anonym29 9 hours ago
He 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 9 hours ago
He 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.
brightball 9 hours ago
BLKNSLVR 9 hours ago
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago
walrus01 8 hours ago
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
BLKNSLVR 4 hours ago
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago
Eeesh, the propaganda must be strong in the US if you're getting downvoted for this. You're essentially summarising documented facts.
VCFundedGenYer 9 hours ago
He got stuck in Russia. He didn’t flee to Russia. Don’t twist facts.
firesteelrain 8 hours ago
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago
nl 8 hours ago
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
TiredOfLife 6 hours ago
He didn't flee. Just went home.
corndoge 8 hours ago
The 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.
Quothling 5 hours ago
Who 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.
_nobody 33 minutes ago
> Who are these people that you talk about?
Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!
tyrabound 2 hours ago
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
octoberfranklin 7 hours ago
People don't care about things unless/until they become part of the Omnicause.
mitxela 3 hours ago
What's that?
pjc50 an hour ago
motionlessveloc 9 hours ago
So 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 9 hours 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
0110101001 8 hours ago
Because 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.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago
whatshisface 8 hours ago
walrus01 9 hours ago
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
dinfinity 8 hours ago
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
lern_too_spel 6 hours ago
TiredOfLife 6 hours ago
For somebody staying quiet as fuck he sure likes to repost russian bs.
BLKNSLVR 11 hours ago
The 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 11 hours ago
Not 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.
walrus01 7 hours ago
> Greenwald had to shift to alt media
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
nextstep an hour ago
rerdavies 6 hours ago
microtherion 3 hours ago
aaron_m04 10 hours ago
So are you saying Applebaum was framed?
iamnothere 10 hours ago
WarOnPrivacy 9 hours ago
Arainach 10 hours 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.
bluegatty 8 hours ago
starkd 10 hours ago
iamnothere 10 hours ago
LastTrain 9 hours ago
Why must there be?
lern_too_spel 6 hours ago
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
wvbdmp 2 hours ago
In what way is PRISM a nothingburger? You’ve been making this claim repeatedly in this thread.
lern_too_spel an hour ago
righthand 28 minutes ago
“The Media” is a bunch of diaper wearing cowards that capitulate to the feds. Plain and simple.
ericyd 11 hours ago
[flagged]
jdiff 11 hours ago
It's really never been the worst thing. From MKUltra to Operation Sea-Spray and many, many more.
joe_the_user 11 hours ago
The 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!
jojobas 11 hours ago
Two dead and few dozen ill doesn't quite sound like the worst thing. Random street cops do that to more people for no good reason in any given year.
N_Lens 10 hours ago
all2 11 hours ago
Those are all conspiracy theories. ;)
riddley 10 hours ago
DubiousPusher 11 hours ago
ivolimmen 5 hours ago
My 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.
jeroenhd an hour ago
Nothing 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.o...
ivolimmen 24 minutes ago
Thanks that works
ak39 4 hours ago
Using FF here, no such warning on my side. Likely your ISP?
cocodill 12 hours ago
If you leak it, leak it everywhere!
Barbing 10 hours ago
IIRC he tried to find people he could trust to redact in a way that would protect US national security interests.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago
And 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).
WarOnPrivacy 10 hours ago
Besides the undisclosed portions of the Snowden archives, I was also disappointed that the Assange/Wikileaks insurance files were never decrypted.
21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago
and 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.
Coeur 10 hours ago
Snowden 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 10 hours ago
Therefore there should be no harm in releasing it.
NamTaf 8 hours ago
That 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 7 hours ago
pluc 11 hours ago
Eh, the outrage never really materialized into anything worth continuing the leaks. Look at the Epstein files. "They" can just wait it out.
BLKNSLVR 11 hours ago
The banality of the day after outrage.
tasty_freeze 9 hours ago
JD 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 9 hours ago
joe_the_user 10 hours ago
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
phendrenad2 9 hours 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.
sriramraja251 6 hours ago
The 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.
bflesch 11 hours ago
In 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 11 hours ago
Be 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 11 hours ago
That’s a gross misrepresentation of their point.
fn-mote 11 hours ago
totetsu 8 hours ago
I wouldn't call Five eyes very democratically supervised.. It seems there is hardly any oversight at all.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/512315/updates-foreign-a...
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB. Nor was it put to any other minister. "This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
markdown 11 hours ago
> the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
Surely you mean oligarch-supervised institutions.
Our institutions are supervised by representatives elected on the dime of corporate and billionaire benefactors. They pull the strings.
It became a banana republic when money became speech.
BoggleOhYeah 7 hours ago
It 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 3 hours ago
Had he stayed in the US whatever could he have done? The US are not known for their ability to accept wrongdoing.
sensanaty 2 hours ago
If 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.