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