What Happened to the Snowden Archive

The last document from the Snowden archive was published on May 29, 2019. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the archive. Hundreds of thousands of documents remain in the hands of journalists who stopped publishing and have never explained why.

A detailed investigation published this week by libroot.org traces what happened to the archive across every outlet that held a copy: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, Der Spiegel, and The Intercept. The picture that emerges is one of quiet capitulation, government pressure, and editorial decisions that left the bulk of the archive buried.

How the archive was distributed

Snowden shared the archive gradually. In March 2013 he sent filmmaker Laura Poitras a link to an encrypted file called astro_noise, which she downloaded but could not open. In May he sent keys to an encrypted archive called Pandora, containing about 50'000 documents. He warned Poitras about a "single point of failure" and urged her to distribute copies. She sent three: one to Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, one to a person who has asked not to be identified, and one to someone who remains unknown.

Glenn Greenwald received his copy on June 1, 2013, on the way to the airport, and read it for the first time on the flight to Hong Kong. Der Spiegel obtained their archive from Poitras. The New York Times and ProPublica got theirs from The Guardian, under conditions typed on a single sheet of A4 by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, restricting coverage to surveillance and civil liberties rather than wartime intelligence.

The Guardian: 58'000 documents, 26 published

The Guardian published its first Snowden story on June 6, 2013. The following day, UK defence officials issued a confidential D notice to every major British media outlet in an attempt to censor coverage. The D notice system, dating to 1912, is a voluntary arrangement under which news organisations consult the Ministry of Defence before publishing material touching national security.

Under pressure from Downing Street and Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, three Guardian executives destroyed the computers holding their London-based archive in a basement on July 20, 2013, six weeks after their first Snowden story. Two GCHQ technicians supervised the destruction. The Guardian's deputy editor later called it "purely a symbolic act" because the material had already been copied to the US.

The Guardian published its last Snowden documents on February 27, 2014. Over nine months it had published around 26 of the 58'000 documents it held, roughly 0.05%. Editor Alan Rusbridger had told the Home Affairs Committee that there had been "more than 100 contacts" with UK and US government agencies during the reporting. The D notice secretary was eventually invited into the Guardian's morning conference.

The Washington Post: 50'000 documents, 30 published

Barton Gellman, who received the archive with Poitras, built an elaborate security system at The Washington Post. Dedicated computers with networking hardware physically removed, stored in a windowless room with a high-security lock and a 400-pound safe bolted to the floor. Decryption keys on memory cards never kept in the same room. Four credentials required for access, divided among the team, with nobody but Gellman holding all four. He applied epoxy and glitter to laptop screws to detect tampering.

The Washington Post published its last Snowden documents in July 2014, around 30 documents in total, about 0.06% of the archive. Gellman left the Post in 2014. He said in 2020 that his material is now in "cold storage, as secure and inaccessible as I could devise." In 2022 he acknowledged the archive would be "really valuable for constructive research" but that "the opsec needed to share it with anyone else is too hard to deal with. I just put the whole thing in cold storage. I feel bad about that."

The Intercept: the last holdout

The Intercept was the only outlet still publishing Snowden documents after 2015. It continued until March 2019, when it closed its archive. Eleven weeks later, on May 29, 2019, it released what became the final batch. Poitras said in 2022 that the archive "still exists, and there is still more to report," describing "a vast amount of information that hasn't been reported of enormous contemporary and historical significance." Greenwald said in 2023 that the archive runs to "hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more." Neither has published anything from it in seven years, and neither has explained why.

What was suppressed

Jacob Appelbaum, who worked on the archive with Poitras and Der Spiegel, said in 2016 that The Guardian holds ProPublica in a gag over the Snowden archive. "ProPublica has access to the Snowden archive. But they are not allowed to publish things, unless the Guardian will allow them. And the Guardian has decided that they will not allow things from the Snowden archive to be published. Things about Afghanistan and Iraq. Crimes, serious war crimes are documented in there. Crimes where civilians are killed."

Rusbridger's own account reveals that Snowden asked from the start that reporting stay on surveillance and privacy rather than wartime intelligence. When MacAskill later identified about a dozen stories that might become reportable if that restriction was lifted, Rusbridger rejected them, saying none were "as explosive as the original stories."

The silence

What stopped was not the reporting but the publication of documents. The Guardian kept analyzing the archive and sharing documents with The New York Times for months after its last document publication. But it chose not to release any more. Der Spiegel stopped in January 2015. The New York Times and ProPublica stopped in August 2015, ten weeks after Rusbridger left the editorship of the paper whose conditions they were working under.

The libroot.org investigation contacted The Guardian, ProPublica, and The New York Times with questions about whether they still hold Snowden material and why publication stopped. The Guardian replied that they had nothing new to share and don't routinely comment on editorial decision making. ProPublica did not respond. The New York Times did not respond.

More than seven years after the last publication, the Snowden archive sits in cold storage, encrypted, inaccessible, in the hands of people who once promised to inform the public and then stopped. The documents about Afghanistan, Iraq, and civilian casualties that Appelbaum described have never seen the light of day. The question is not whether the archive still exists. It does. The question is whether anyone will ever publish from it again.