What happened to the Snowden archive
Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document.
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it closed its archive in March 2019. Eleven weeks later, on 29 May 2019, it released what would become the final batch of documents from the archive. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the Snowden archive.
Snowden started reaching out to journalists months before having any material to share. In December 2012, he contacted Guardian columnist and former attorney Glenn Greenwald, requesting that he set up a secure communication channel, though Greenwald didn't know how to do so.[1] After a second attempt in January failed to make progress, Snowden shifted his focus to Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker. Poitras then teamed up with an investigative journalist Barton Gellman.[1]
Snowden shared the archive gradually. On 31 March 2013 he sent Poitras a link to an encrypted file called astro_noise,[2] which she downloaded and filmed herself doing so, but had no key to open it.[3] On 10 May Snowden posted a box from Hawaii to a Brooklyn address he had asked her to supply. It went to Jessica Bruder, a journalist who had agreed to receive a package without being told what it was, and who passed it unopened to Dale Maharidge, and then Maharidge handed it to Poitras on 15 May.
On 21 May 2013 Snowden sent Poitras and Gellman the keys to an encrypted archive called Pandora containing about 50,000 documents.[4][5][1]
At some point in late May, Snowden warned Poitras about what he called a "single point of failure," and urged her to get copies of the material into other hands. She distributed three. One went to Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with a note asking him to hold the material and not to give it to anyone but Greenwald, and only if Greenwald asked in person. One went to a person who has asked not to be identified. The third went to someone who remains unknown. Maharidge kept a copy himself, saying in 2017 that he still had it.[6] Aside from Poitras, Gellman, and Greenwald, it's unclear whether the others holding copies can actually read the documents, since the copies are likely encrypted and they may not have the key.
Greenwald received the Pandora copy from Poitras on 1 June 2013, on the way to the airport,[1] and read it for the first time on the flight to Hong Kong.[7] The Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill was handed the GCHQ material in Hong Kong,[1] and brought it to the Guardian's London office.[8] Der Spiegel obtained their archive from Poitras in that summer.[9] The New York Times and ProPublica got theirs from the Guardian.[10][11]
Greenwald said in 13 March 2019 that he and Poitras "individually and independently, continue to possess full copies of the archive, as do other individuals and institutions."[12]
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." But neither has published anything from it in seven years, and neither has explained why.
The Guardian
Snowden gave a large portion of the archive to the Scottish journalist Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong, containing "tens of thousands of documents." In Citizenfour, Snowden is filmed handing GCHQ material to MacAskill in the Hong Kong hotel room. Snowden describes it as coming from the agency's internal wiki — "at the top secret, you know, super classified level, where anybody working intelligence can work on anything they want" — and adds: "That's what this is. I'm giving it to you. You can make the decision on that, what's appropriate, what's not." MacAskill brought his copy to the Guardian's London office.[8] The Guardian later stated that their archive contained around 58,000 documents.
The Guardian published its first Snowden story with a document from the archive on 6 June 2013. The following day, UK defence officials issued a confidential D notice to every major British media outlet "in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US."
The DPBAC committee (the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee) issuing D notices runs what was then called the DA-Notice system, a voluntary arrangement dating to 1912, under which news organisations consult the Ministry of Defence before publishing material touching national security. In 2013, the serving secretary was Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance.
The D Notice was issued to a press already inclined to cooperate. Reviewing the academic literature in 2018, Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay from Bangor University noted that:
Many longitudinal studies of British press and broadcasting coverage across the two-year period following Snowden's initial revelations find most outlets privileging political sources seeking to justify and defend the security services and mass surveillance.
According to Bakir and McStay the alignment was close to uniform. The Daily Mail, Mirror, Star, Telegraph, Sun and Times were coded pro-surveillance. Only the Independent, the i and the People leaned the other way. The Guardian and the Express were balanced. What that meant in practice, they write, was that "citizens' privacy rights and surveillance regulation were minimally discussed, while mass surveillance was normalised by suggesting that it is necessary for national security." Prominent press themes "were that social media companies should do more to fight terrorism, and that while surveillance of politicians is problematic, surveillance of the public should be increased."
The Daily Mail – which published more articles on Snowden than any other British outlet besides the Guardian – is a prime example of this trend. In the six months following the initial leak, the outlet concentrated on Snowden's "lavish lifestyle on the run and his sexual appeal." As Bakir and McStay note, these tactics appeared designed to discredit or draw attention away from the GCHQ revelations he exposed.
Following pressure from Downing Street and Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, three Guardian executives destroyed the computers holding their London-based archive in a basement on 20 July 2013, six weeks after their first Snowden story. Two GCHQ technicians supervised the destruction. The paper kept the action secret[11][13], only making it public a month later on August 19.
Paul Johnson, then deputy editor of the Guardian and one of the three who destroyed the computers, later called the destruction "purely a symbolic act", because the government knew "that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn't changed anything."
The DPBAC committee's own minutes record something happening in the same weeks. Vallance told that "at the outset the Guardian had avoided engaging with the DA-Notice system before publishing the first tranche", that as a member of the Newspaper Publishers Association it "was obliged to seek (but not necessarily to accept) DA Notice advice under the terms of the DA Notice code," and that this failure "was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it." Towards the end of July 2013, he said, the Guardian "had begun to seek and accept DA Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details."
The Guardian's then editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was publicly questioned on 3 December 2013, in the Home Affairs Committee, about the Guardian's Snowden reporting. "In terms of publishing documents, I think we have published 26," Rusbridger said, "I would not be expecting us to be publishing a huge amount more. With 26 over six months, I would say it has been a trickle." Rusbridger said that during the last six months "there have been more than 100 contacts" with UK and US government agencies.[14] "We were in continuous contact with the intelligence agencies and the White House," Rusbridger writes in 2018.[15] When asked about how many of the 58,000 documents were read, Rusbridger replied "I could not tell you. I don't know."[16]
Rusbridger told the Home Affairs Committee that of roughly 35 stories published, the Guardian had consulted the authorities on all but one. Of Vallance he said: "We have, in fact, collaborated with him since and he has been at The Guardian to talk to all our reporters." Rusbridger added in 2018 that Vallance was in time invited into the Guardian's morning conference.[17] Rusbridger's account of the arrangement is that Vallance was reviewing stories as they came and rarely objecting.[18] Gellman wrote that the Guardian "killed some of its stories for legal reasons and delayed others for months."[19]
Three months later, on 27 February 2014, the Guardian published its last Snowden documents. Over nine months it had published around 30 of the 58,000 documents it held — 0.05%. Rusbridger would later describe the episode as the story with the biggest global impact in the Guardian's 190-year history.[20]
What stopped in February 2014 was the publication of documents, not the reporting. For example on January 2015 the Guardian reported from the Snowden documents that GCHQ had captured the emails of journalists at major international outlets. And on June 2015 it published a joint investigation with The New York Times into GCHQ's role in American drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, drawn from the documents provided by Snowden to the Guardian "and shared with The New York Times."
So even sixteen months after its last document publication, the Guardian was still analyzing the archive and sharing documents with its American partner, but it chose not to release any documents (nor did The New York Times).
In May in 2014, the DPBAC committee's chair reported that engagement with the Guardian had continued to strengthen and that the process "had culminated by the appointment of Paul Johnson (Guardian deputy editor) as a DPBAC member."
Jacob Appelbaum – who worked on the archive, published extensive reporting in Der Spiegel and elsewhere, and helped Poitras vet Snowden — sharply criticized the Guardian in March 2016:
[...] And while writing technical stories [about the Snowden documents], [the Guardian] directly consulted with the White House and with GCHQ and other government officials in order to do essentially line by line redaction of things that were for the most part not actually even worth redacting. They weren't even worth compromising yourself. It reminds me of the Winston Churchill story about whether or not someone would sleep with him for a million dollars. And of course, when the person says no to one dollar but yes to a million, we know what kind of person that person is. And the same is true for the Guardian. They were willing to compromise and to give editorial control to the state. What are they then? They're stenographers.
In his 2018 book Breaking News, Rusbridger covers the Snowden era in extensive detail, discussing the Heywood meetings, the destruction of the hard drives at the Guardian's London office, Miranda's detention at Heathrow, critical editorials from rival newspapers, and politicians demanding prosecutions. However, the reporting ends in a single clause: "Once the Snowden coverage had died down."[21] This stands out as the only major event in the chapter lacking a clear actor or motivation. While all the other actions have clear motives, media coverage just fades away, with no explanation who decided to stop, when the choice was made, or why.
When asked in 2023 about the lack of document publication, MacAskill blamed waning interest, noting that "each story attracted smaller and smaller readerships, as interest dwindled."
That is hard to square with what the Guardian's own editor says about the same period. The paper published its last Snowden document accompynied with a story which was significant front-page news, as the most Snowden stories before it had been. Two months later it won a Pulitzer for the reporting. Eight months after the last document, Rusbridger records, the paper overtook The New York Times to become the leading serious English-language newspaper website in the world, having been the ninth-biggest paper in Britain.[22] He attributes the rise to doing "the stuff that journalism was — at least in our reckoning — supposed to do": a list of subjects he expected nobody to read, in which security and civil liberties come second and third. "No one — surely — would read you if you banged on about climate change, security, civil liberties [...] But they did." He concluded that "there was clearly a huge, and global, appetite for significant news presented seriously. There was a need for it."[22]
Nor had the appetite gone elsewhere. Der Spiegel went on publishing documents into 2015, with stories that made international headlines. The Intercept continued until 2019, across almost a hundred pieces. Whatever caused the Guardian to stop publishing documents in February 2014, it was not that there was nothing left or that nobody was reading.
According to Rusbridger[10] and MacAskill, Snowden had asked from the start that the reporting stay on surveillance and privacy rather than the wartime use of intelligence, and that Rusbridger had issued that internally as an edict. MacAskill describes being asked by Rusbridger, at some point after the London copy was destroyed, to go back to The New York Times — "which still had the material" — and review it for stories that might become reportable if that restriction were lifted. He returned to London with a list of about a dozen. Rusbridger rejected them, MacAskill writes, "not only because he had not intended to renege on the agreement with Snowden, but also because none of them was as explosive as the original stories."
There is a gap in the account of where the Guardian's copies went. Rusbridger writes in Breaking News that after the London destruction the paper was "left with the dossier intact — in New York," noting that the UK authorities showed little interest in "the material we held at 536 Broadway,"[23] the Guardian's own New York office. But when Rusbridger later asked MacAskill to review what remained, MacAskill didn't go to his own paper's New York office, but instead he was sent to The New York Times, "which still had the material." And in 2023, describing where the archive sits now, MacAskill mentions only the copy locked in an office at The New York Times, with the Guardian retaining responsibility for it. The Guardian's own New York copy is not mentioned.
The Guardian shared their archive with The New York Times and partly with ProPublica,[11] under an agreement Rusbridger describes in Breaking News.[10]
[...] I typed out our conditions for collaboration on a side of A4. The main stipulation was that the NYT (and also ProPublica) wouldn't use the archive as a bran tub to go fishing for stories unrelated to Snowden's primary focus. I knew there were documents about Afghanistan, Iraq, even Kenya, in the archive. We weren't going to look at that. This was about surveillance and civil liberties, not the wartime use of intelligence. The NYT agreed. Sometimes I think they (and ProPublica) wished they hadn't, but they stuck by the agreement.
In March 2016, Appelbaum said that the Guardian holds ProPublica in a gag over the Snowden archive.
[...] For example, the Guardian holds ProPublica in a gag. You may not know this. But 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. Things that are absolutely political. And we will never see them, because of the collaborationists at the Guardian, who absolutely kowtow to the British political class and the hereditary power structures in the UK. [...]
On 18 August 2026 we contacted the Guardian's press office with questions. The press office replied saying they had nothing new to share, that they don't routinely comment on editorial decision making, and that we were asking about issues from over a decade ago. They didn't address whether they still hold a copy or if any material remains at The New York Times and whether they retain any responsibility for it, or whether they hold any approval rights over publication by their partners – none of which are editorial decisions.
The Washginton Post
Barton Gellman holds a significant portion of the full archive. He received a copy with Poitras from Snowden in 21 May 2013,[1] containing over 50,000[5] documents.[4] Gellman took a copy of his archive to The Washington Post's New York office in May 2013, where it was secured[24] until he left The Washington Post in 2014 and it stopped publishing Snowden documents.
Gellman said in 2020 that his "material is now in cold storage, as secure and inaccessible as I could devise." In 2022 he agreed with Poitras that the archive would be "really valuable for constructive research," but added 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."
Gellman's account of what The Washington Post built is the fullest description anyone has given of how the archive was held in any outlet.
He went to the editor, Marty Baron, with a list. Dedicated computers with freshly wiped, encrypted drives. Networking hardware physically removed, cutting the machines off from the internet and the newsroom's own systems. A windowless room with a high-security lock, a reinforced door, and a heavy safe bolted to the floor. Decryption keys stored on memory cards and never kept in the same room except when in use. Access would require four credentials — door key, safe combination, digital key card, passphrases — divided among the team, with nobody but Gellman holding all four.[25]
The Washington Post's first attempt at the room had a wall full of windows, with a view of the Russian ambassador's residence half a block away. They found another. It got a high-security lock, a camera in the hall outside and a safe weighing four hundred pounds. Gellman kept a second safe at his own office in New York.[25]
Working alongside technologist Ashkan Soltani, they prepared their laptops by removing the internal Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and batteries, ensuring the machines would instantly shutdown and encrypt themselves if unplugged. They physically sealed the USB ports and maintained strict security by taking their keys out of the room every time they left, even for a quick bathroom break. To catch any potential physical tampering, Gellman applied epoxy and glitter to the laptop screws and tested ultraviolet powder on the safe's dial. He stored all his notes on encrypted volumes that required five distinct passphrases just to open each morning, a system that backfired when he forgot one passphrase and lost access to some files forever.[25]
The Washington Post published its last Snowden documents in July 2014. At the end, it published around 30 documents in total,[26] or about 0.06% from the archive it had.
Gellman writes that by late autumn 2015, he and Soltani were no longer writing articles for the newspaper. Soltani stopped using his old laptop, gave back an encryption key fob, and cut his ties to the archive.[27]
The New York Times and ProPublica
Both The New York Times and ProPublica received material from the Guardian in 2013, under the conditions Rusbrdiger typed onto the sheet of A4.[10] Neither held the full archive, and neither has ever said how much it received.
The New York Times and ProPublica published a handful of documents between 2014 and 2015. The last story was a joint investigation published on 15 August 2015. Neither has published a Snowden document since, and neither has explained why. Both stopped immediately after a substantial joint investigation rather than after a decline, and both stopped ten weeks after Rusbridger left the editorship of the paper whose conditions they were working under.
There is one account of those conditions operating on a specific story, though it is second-hand and unconfirmed. Appelbaum has said that Jeff Larson, who contributed reporting to ProPublica's 2014 piece on the Mumbai attacks, told him the partners who had supplied the files under conditions wanted the account steered so that important parts would not appear, and that Larson was able to report freely only after obtaining the original material from Poitras and Appelbaum directly.
We asked ProPublica whether it still holds any Snowden material, whether that material is subject to an approval requirement, and why the publication stopped. We received no response.
Der Spiegel
German journalists Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, working for Der Spiegel, published a book about the Snowden affair in 2014, called Der NSA-Komplex. In the book they write how Der Spiegel got its material.
At first Rosenbach and Stark tried getting access to the Snowden archive via Greenwald. On a Saturday in mid-June 2013 they took a call from an acquaintance who said Greenwald was willing to sit down with them. The next morning they flew to Rio with hard drives, laptops, a cryptophone and encryption software in their hand luggage.[9]
They met at a hotel on Copacabana. At ten in the evening, two hours late, Greenwald shuffled into the lobby in bermuda shorts, flip-flops and a washed-out T-shirt, a black rucksack over his shoulder holding the drives full of American state secrets. "They broke into my house today and stole a computer," he said, visibly shaken. "What can I help you with?" He pointed them at various documents concerning Germany, but said that they would have to obtain them by some other route.[9]
Rosenbach and Stark flew home the next morning empty-handed. Back in Berlin they went to Poitras, who had already heard about the Rio trip and knew them slightly from their earlier WikiLeaks reporting. They proposed working together on stories for Der Spiegel, with Poitras as co-author and freelance contributor. She was a byline on the paper's first Snowden cover story on 1 July, and on much of what followed.[9]
Der Spiegel fought with the NSA every week. "Over months we dealt weekly with headquarters at Fort Meade, at times also with the White House," they write. "Every Friday, at the Spiegel's deadline, we wrestled with the intelligence service over the details of the reporting, sometimes by email, sometimes by conference call."[9]
They describe withholding material. "It cannot be the aim of critical journalism to play into the hands of the opponents and declared enemies of democracies, or to do the business of other intelligence services," they write. "For that reason we tried, in an extensive process of discussion, to weigh where the boundaries of public interest lie — and at a number of points refrained from publishing sensitive information."[9]
Der Spiegel published some 140 documents across around eighteen stories between July 2013 and January 2015. Its two largest releases were also its last two: 44 documents in December 2014, and 36 on January 2015.
Der Spiegel has never said why it stopped publishing documents.
The Intercept
In Hong Kong 2013, Snowden told the journalists to spread the material, that they should make sure it was never held by one person alone. "Make sure that never only one single person possesses a copy," he said. "The United States or its allies will quite certainly kill you if they believe you are the weakest link in the chain, through which the publication of the information could be stopped." Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill were to ensure that "people you can trust" held copies.[28]
Within weeks, only the two of them held complete copies, by agreement. Greenwald and Poitras decided that nobody else would ever have access to the full archive, in order to protect the material and avoid legal entaglements, and to keep the outlets they worked with, as Greenwald put it, "on a leash." Everyone else got a portion. "Only Laura and I have access to the full set of documents which Snowden provided to journalists," Greenwald told BuzzFeed at the end of August 2013. The New York Times and ProPublica had only the GCHQ material, and Gellman likewise had "only a small subset of the documents, though the number is substantial and relate to NSA."
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 arrangement drew criticism at the time. Writing at Pando in November 2013, Mark Ames argued that the most significant secrets of the era had ended up dependent on the goodwill of a single billionaire.
In April 2014 FLM hired Lynn Dombek from the Associated Press as research director, to build a team providing primary sources and evidence for its publications. Morgan Marquis-Boire joined as director of security in June 2014, and Erinn Clark, previously a Tor Project developer, joined as lead security architect that September.
They built a SCIF (a secure compartmented information facility) on the 19th floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan. A former FLM employee described it having double doors that could only be opened by two people with separate keys, computers requiring two operators to start, phones left outside, and permission needed to burn anything from the archive to an air-gapped computer.
The 2014 and 2015 returns list The Intercept alongside Racket, Reported.ly and Field of Vision, with no research or security activity declared, even though during 2014-15 The Intercept published around 256 documents from the archive.[29]
On 16 May 2016, The Intercept announced it would begin publishing the NSA's internal newsletter in batches and open the archive to outside journalists and researchers. Greenwald wrote that there were "still many documents of legitimate interest to the public that can and should be disclosed," and encouraged others to comb through the material because "others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not."
In the same year, FLM declared the Research and Security Group to the IRS as a new significant program service: "a group of award-winning research, security, engineering and editorial experts who make documents available for inquiry and analysis in secure environments." It was reported at $863,189, one of the organisation's three largest program services that year.
In 2017 the Research and Security Group was one of FLM's three largest program services at $1,578,937 in a year the organisation lost $12.2 million. It was the worst year in its history, and it still funded the archive programme at nearly double the previous year's figure.
By the 2018 return, the Research and Security Group had ceased to be a programme, and it was now a single clause inside the description of The Intercept: "Through the Research and Security group, known as Neptune, which includes award-winning research, security, engineering and editorial experts, The Intercept makes documents available for inquiry and analysis in secure environments."
The closure
On 4 March 2019, Betsy Reed, The Intercept's editor-in-chief, emailed Laura Poitras to ask for a meeting, in confidence, about "how we've assessed our priorities in the course of the budget process, and made some restructuring decisions." Two days later Reed and Jeremy Scahill went to Poitras's studio in Tribeca and told her that four positions were being cut, among them the staff who maintained the Snowden archive. During the meeting it became "clear they have decided to eliminate the research department," Poitras wrote.
Poitras objected repeatedly over the following days, in meetings and in writing. "Rather than causing the closure of the archive," she wrote, "I objected to it in meetings and in writing multiple times. The Intercept's editors said the reason for their decision was a budget cut." Eliminating the research department, she argued, would jeopardise the archive's security and was therefore negligent, and would make "unauthorized changes to the agreement" under which FLM held the archive.
On 10 March she argued that the department cost 1.5% of FLM's total budget. She offered several ways round it, including reducing her own salary to pay for the remaining staff. At this point the budget was the only reason anyone had given.
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."
On that same day, 10 March, the problem appeared to be solved. Drew Wilson, FLM's chief financial officer, emailed Poitras to say he had spoken with the chief executive Michael Bloom, and that "for now, we will hold off on any actions on the remaining two staff in the research team until clarity on the go-forward strategy is reached. I informed Betsy that for now she will not have to cover this portion of the cost reduction in the upcoming restructuring this week."
Poitras thanked him the next day for "putting a pause on eliminating positions that directly impact the archive security." The problem, as she put it, seemed solved.
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".
On 13 March, Poitras sent a memo to FLM's board urging it to intervene, noting that she had not been consulted and the board had not been told either. Hours later, Bloom emailed the company:[30]
As numerous media outlets have discovered over the last several years, the current business environment sometimes requires painful decisions, and it is always agonizing when reorganization results in the loss of colleagues' jobs. [...] It is crucial to recall that major news outlets that possessed large portions of the Snowden archive — newsrooms much larger than The Intercept's — ceased reporting on it years ago. Many decided that the resources required to continue to work on the archive were not justified by the journalistic value the remaining documents provide, as those documents have aged. For five years, the company expended substantial resources to continue to report on the Snowden archive, but The Intercept has now decided to focus on other editorial priorities.
Read closely, the only reason Bloom gives for The Intercept's own decision is the last clause, that it had decided to focus on other editorial priorities. The aging documents and the unjustified resources are attributed to other outlets, describing what they concluded years earlier. They are given as context and not as a stated rationale.
Poitras replied to Bloom the same day.
Michael, As I have communicated to you and Betsy, I am sickened by your decision to eliminate the research team, which has been the beating heart of the newsroom since First Look Media was founded, and has overseen the protection of the Snowden archive.
I am also sickened by your joint decision to shut down the Snowden archive, which I was informed of only yesterday — a decision made without consulting me or the board of directors. Your email's attempt to paper over these firings is not appropriate when the company is presented with such devastating news.
Her email leaked to the Daily Beast which published it that evening. On the following day 14 March Poitras telephoned Snowden to apologize, who had not been told.
Greenwald issued a statement on 14 March.[12] Of the other outlets that had held and reported on Snowden documents, he wrote:
But all of them stopped working completely on the Snowden archive and stopped publishing Snowden documents many years ago, presumably because they decided that the massive financial and human resources required to work with the archive - including elaborate security measures to protect it and large teams of journalists and editors to curate and responsibly report on it - were no longer justified by the journalistic value the archive provided as the remaining documents aged.
Then, of The Intercept's own decision:
The Intercept's decision to stop working with the archive was the by-product of those financial constraints and, critically, of my intent to seek other partners - particularly academic institutions and research facilities - to ensure continued publication of the remaining Snowden documents that are in the public interest.
The last sentence repays reading twice. The construction is that the decision was the by-product of (a) financial constraints and, critically, of (b) my intent to seek other partners. There are two causes, with the second highlighted as "critically", as the more significant one. The partner search is treated as the main cause. The decision doesn't come from The Intercept, the board, or from Greenwald and Poitras together, but from Greenwald himself.
Based on his own words, Greenwald closed the archive because he planned to move it somewhere else, which was more important than the finances.
Four reasons had now been given for the closure during eleven days:
- Budget cuts — the initial meetings and emails, 4 to 10 March.
- The archive was no longer of value to The Intercept — the telephone call of 12 March.
- The Intercept had decided to focus on other editorial priorities — Bloom's staff email, 13 March.
- Financial constraints "and, critically, of my intent to seek other partners" — Greenwald's statement, 14 March.
The laid-off staff were required to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing their work.
By the 2019 return, filed in November 2020, the Research and Security Group has gone, which is expected. Part III of the form asks whether the organization stopped running or significantly changed any of its program services. FLM answered "No." However, it had answered "Yes" twice in the past: in 2015, when three abandoned projects ended, and in 2017, for Reported.ly, an experimental social-media news network. Notably, a publication that never actually launched was reported to the federal government as a discontinued program service, while the Snowden archive was not.
The same return shows revenue of $28.4 million against expenses of $28.2 million. Net assets up again, to $21.5 million. Total compensation up from $9.8 million to $16.6 million. Program spending up by $1.26 million. 87 employees, against 50 in 2016. The single largest outside contractor was Enzuli Management LLC, at $458,337, described in the return as "journalism services, including but not limited to services provided by Glenn Greenwald."
The Intercept kept publishing for another eleven weeks. On 29 May 2019 it released the eighth and final batch of SIDtoday documents alongside four stories drawn from it. That day is the last time anyone, anywhere, published a Snowden document.
Two years later, Greenwald gave a fifth reason for the closure, and it contradicted his own.
In February 2021, New York Magazine revisited the closure. Greenwald said that "nobody wanted to close the archive," that he "never heard anyone at The Intercept talking about wanting to close it," and that "the only reason it was closed was because a dispute arose between Betsy and Laura — after Betsy was required by First Look to lay off four employees — about whether the archive would still be securely maintained if Betsy proceeded to lay off the people she chose to lay off."
In March 2019 he had written that the closure was the by-product of financial constraints and, critically, of his own intent to seek other partners. But now in 2021 nobody wanted it, and it happened because two colleagues disagreed.
Scahill, quoted in the same article, said: "It is my understanding that Laura attempted to place conditions on the continued use of the archive that no independent outlet or editor-in-chief could accept and then sought to blame The Intercept for a scenario she herself made inevitable."
Poitras says the conditions weren't hers, that they were the terms of an existing confidential agreement with FLM, covering how the archive had to be secured. Cutting the staff, she argued, would breach them. David Bralow, FLM's general counsel, said the opposite: "any suggestion that The Intercept violated any contract by making budgetary decisions about its staff is false."
Poitras responded to the article by updating her open letter, republishing some of the emails Barrett Brown had released in March 2019 and adding others. Her former colleagues, she wrote, "made several unsupported claims regarding the closure of the NSA Snowden Archive." She concluded: "The Intercept's effort to rewrite history is not only full of falsehoods, but is quite literally hard to stomach."
She had put the underlying objection more plainly two years earlier, in her reply to Bloom:
How a news organization would take such care to secure this archive, and then walk away from that knowledge and its investment without a proper review involving the board and all stakeholders, defies my understanding.
The closure wasn't only justified by shifting and conflicting reasons, but it was also done very quickly, and without the people who might've prevented it. Nine days passed between the first meeting and the public announcement.
Nor was the alternative plans considered. Micah Lee, The Intercept's director of information security, said in the 2021 New York Magazine article that his team could have come up with a plan to secure the archive. "I feel like a compromise wasn't seriously considered."
And on the call of 12 March 2019, according to Poitras, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept.
The arguments
Bloom's email and Greenwald's statement rest on two arguments about the closure: (1) that the remaining documents had lost their journalistic value with age, and (2) that other outlets had reached the same conclusion years earlier. Both arguments warrant scrutiny, because together they have come to form the accepted explanation for why the Snowden archive eventually fell silent.
"The remaining documents have aged"
The argument is that documents lose journalistic value as they get older, and that by 2019 what was left no longer justified the cost of holding it.
The argument is difficult to reconcile. The most recent material in the archive dates from April 2013,[31] so at the time of the closure many of the documents were just six years old. And in journalism decades-old declassified documents regularly become the basis for significant journalism. Also as time passes the case against publishing the documents weakens while the case for disclosure strengthens.
Both Greenwald and Poitras agree that the archive had stopped being news. Greenwald wrote in his statement[12] that it was "far less of a news resource and far more of a historical asset." Poitras wrote in the same year that "while it is true the archive can no longer be reported on as 'news,' it remains the most significant historical archive documenting the rise of the surveillance state in the twenty first century."
Greenwald and Bloom didn't say the archive had stopped being news, but that it had lost journalistic value, as if it was no longer worth the effort of journalistic reporting at all.
The Intercept was still publishing documents until the very end. The final batch of documents was published on 29 May 2019, eleven weeks after the closure was announced, and produced four stories. Similarily the Guardian went from a front-page GCHQ story in February 2014 to nothing. The New York Times and ProPublica went from a joint investigation in August 2015 to nothing.
And Greenwald had argued the opposite three years earlier. Announcing the batch releases and the outside-access programme in May 2016, he wrote that there were "still many documents of legitimate interest to the public that can and should be disclosed," and urged other journalists and researchers to go through the material because "others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not." In June 2023 he described the archive as running to "hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more."
By most estimates around 1% of the archive has been published.[32] It's a quite confident claim that the other 99% had aged out of journalistic value.
Appelbaum published previously unreported findings from the archive in his 2022 doctoral thesis, including the NSA listing the chipmaker Cavium as a "SIGINT enabled" CPU vendor, NSA compromising Russia's SORM lawful-intercept system, and NSA participation in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards meetings with the explicit aim of weakening protocol security.
He also offered an explanation in his thesis for why so much remains unpublished:
As part of our research, we uncovered evidence that the telecommunications infrastructure in many countries has been compromised by intelligence services. The Snowden archive includes largely unpublished internal NSA documents and presentations that discuss targeting and exploiting not only deployed, live interception infrastructure, but also the vendors of the hardware and software used to build the infrastructure. Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished. Only a few are available to read in public today.
And elsewhere in the same work:
Many journalists who have worked on the Snowden archive know significantly more than they have revealed in public. It is in this sense that the Snowden archive has almost completely failed to create change: many of the backdoors and sabotage unknown to us before 2013 is still unknown to us today. The entire Snowden archive should be open for academic researchers to better understand more of the history of such behavior.
"Other major media outlets stopped reporting as well"
The second claim is that The Intercept was simply the last to do what everyone else had already done. Bloom wrote that the larger newsrooms holding portions of the archive "ceased reporting on it years ago," and many had decided the resources involved were no longer justified "by the journalistic value the remaining documents provide, as those documents have aged." Greenwald used almost the same construction the following day, with one addition — they had stopped, he wrote, "presumably because" they reached that conclusion. Few hours later Greenwald dropped[33] the hedge, saying the other major outlets stopped "for cost reasons."
As a description of the outcome, the claim is accurate. The Guardian published its last documents in February 2014. Der Spiegel's last release was in January 2015. The New York Times and ProPublica both stopped in August 2015. After that, The Intercept was the only outlet publishing new documents, with a few exceptions.[34]
But as an explanation, it doesn't hold.
The only outlet that has explained itself is the Guardian, and its account isn't the one Bloom attributes to it. MacAskill has given two reasons, neither of which is aging documents. The first is readership: "it reached a point where each story attracted smaller and smaller readerships, as interest dwindled. The feeling at The Guardian — and, I assume, at The New York Times and ProPublica — was they had reported on the biggest stories in the documents and there was diminishing interest in publishing more." Note that MacAskill is also presuming about his partners.
MacAskill's second reason is scope. Rusbridger had confined the Guardian's reporting to surveillance and privacy at Snowden's request[10], and when MacAskill was asked to review the material at The New York Times for stories that would become reportable if that restriction were lifted, he returned with about a dozen. Rusbridger declined them.
Unlike the Guardian, The Intercept wasn't bound by the same restrictions in its Snowden reporting. Since its very first Snowden story, The Intercept routinely published stories outside the Guardian's scope.
As for The New York Times and ProPublica, neither of them has explained why they decided to stop. In 2016 Appelbaum said publicly that ProPublica held Snowden material but couldn't publish without the Guardian's consent, which he said was withheld.
Bloom treats the other outlets as having made an editorial judgement, but the Guardian had its London copy destroyed under government supervision and was under police investigation, and The New York Times and ProPublica were both working under written conditions imposed by another outlet.[35]
And The Intercept was founded to report the archive. It was the only outlet that existed for that purpose and the only one that had opened the material to outsiders on the grounds that more remained to be found. The fact that the others stopped publishing documents wasn't an obvious reason for The Intercept to do so.
The budget
Poitras objected to the cuts repeatedly in meetings and in writing. On 10 March 2019 she argued that the research department was only 1.5% of FLM's total budget, and the chief financial officer agreed to keep the two remaining staff. Two days later she was told the archive was being closed anyway.[36]
From the filings it doesn't look as though FLM was under pressure. In 2017 FLM lost $12.2 million and still funded the Research and Security Group at $1,578,937, reporting it as one of its three largest charitable programmes. In 2018 it ran a surplus of just over $6 million and held $21.4 million in net assets. In 2019 it increased program spending, raised total compensation from $9.8 million to $16.6 million, and employed 87 people, up from 50 three years earlier. It paid $458,337 to Glenn Greenwald's company that year.[36]
An organisation running a surplus could afford the archive through the worst year in its history, but couldn't afford it in the best.
"Editorial priorities"
Bloom wrote in his staff email that The Intercept "has now decided to focus on other editorial priorities."[30]
It's the only reason in his email that describes a decision The Intercept itself made, and it's a reason that nobody has ever explained. For example, no new priorities were stated, and there were no changes in publishing formats, audience targeting, or anything else that would indicate a shift in editorial priorities.
By 2016 the organisation had told the federal government that providing access to the archive was a distinct charitable activity, and was funding it at over a million and a half dollars a year.[36] A shift away from that represents a substantial change of direction for a news organisation, yet it was announced in a paragraph of a staff email concerning staff reductions.
"My intent to seek other partners"
Greenwald said in his statement that he had spent "the last several months" seeking "other partners - particularly academic institutions and research facilities - to ensure continued publication of the remaining Snowden documents that are in the public interest."[1]
Seven years later, and no such partner has been found, and no institutions has been named. We asked Greenwald which institutions he approached and what came of it. He did not reply.
Snowden gave his own explanation on 22 April 2019, in an interview with Motherboard's CYBER podcast.[37] The other outlets had stopped, he said, "because it became more expensive and longer form work, instead of like the short punchy news pieces which is what the large appetite is in journalism today." What remained in the archive "is going to require much more substantial effort, basically book length work. You need real researchers to sit down, and to connect all the dots that you can't get across in 750 words. And The Intercept really was not designed for that, unfortunately. None of these news organizations were."
Snowden's explanation that the work became longer-form, and that the outlets weren't built for it, doesn't fit what they had been publishing. For example, The Intercept's January 2019 piece on supply-chain attacks runs to around 5,200 words. Der Spiegel's January 2015 story on the NSA's struggle for control of the internet runs to ~3,700. They were already doing the long-form work he describes as beyond them. Nor is it obvious why an archive of hundreds of thousands of documents, from which 1% had been published, should have produced only the short pieces and none of the long.
Snowden continued saying that the outlets "were supposed to hand this off to academic institutions, but that just hasn't happened because the academic institutions get cold feet. They get nervous. They go, look, we're dependent on grants from the federal government in the U.S. And they don't want to give it to a foreign university because the politics of that, they're worried the government's going to complain."[37] This is the only explanation anyone has given of why the search for a new home failed. But all we know is that the search was given as a reason for closing the archive, and nothing came of it.
While Snowden may well be right about universities, the hand-off doesn't necessarily require an academic institution at all, because dozens of organisations maintain SecureDrop and employ lawyers, and many of them don't depend on federal grants. This could be tested just by submitting a single document to them.[38]
"Nobody wanted to close it"
Two years later, in February 2021, Greenwald said in the New York Magazine that nobody at The Intercept wanted the archive closed, and that it closed only because Reed and Poitras disagreed about whether it could be securely maintained after the layoffs.
In March 2019 he had written that the closure flowed in part from his own intent, and that he had spent the preceding months preparing for it. Poitras was told on 12 March that he and Reed had decided it. Two years later, nobody wanted it and it happened because two other people argued.
Two more arguments could be made for not publishing any documents.
The first is legal risk. The documents carries real exposure under the Espionage Act, but Poitras, Gellman, and Greenwald published from the archive for years when the material was newer and the exposure greater, and none of them has ever cited it as the reason. The second is infrastructure. Publishing from the archive does require some opsec, because the material has to come out of (cold-)storage, be worked with secure air-gapped computers and be read closely enough to know what is worth publishing. Gellman has said the opsec of sharing the archive with anyone else is too hard to deal with, and that explains why he won't hand it to someone, but it doesn't explain why he hasn't shared any documents from it or published himself.
What happened to The Intercept's copy
The Intercept has never said what became of its copy of the archive, beyond that it was closed. In his 2022 doctoral thesis, Appelbaum wrote that it had been destroyed,[39] and in a 2023 interview he said an insider had told him so.
The Intercept destroyed its copy of the Snowden archive. That's what an insider told me. Those responsible for the archive have failed to live up to their responsibilities. They have withheld many things that are in the public interest.
The claim is based on an anonymous source and remains unconfirmed. The Intercept has been asked twice by two journalists and has declined to answer both times. Ralf Hutter put it to The Intercept in June 2023, and The Intercept declined to comment on the archive's existence, saying it was a confidential matter. Stefania Maurizi put the same question in the same year and was told The Intercept doesn't discuss confidential news-gathering materials.
We asked again of The Intercept, of First Look Institute, of Michael Bloom, and of eight people who worked on the archive at The Intercept. Nobody answered.
The holders
Greenwald and Poitras hold complete copies of the archive. Gellman holds the +50,000 files Snowden sent him directly in May 2013. None of them is constrained by anything that constrained The Intercept, like a budget, a board, a funder, or editors.
Greenwald resigned from The Intercept in October 2020, over the spiking of an article, and has published independently ever since. Poitras was terminated in November 2020. Gellman left The Washinton Post in 2014 and has written independently since.
All three have said the material matters. In 2022 Poitras told that "the Snowden Archive still exists, and there is still more to report," and that "there is a vast amount of information that hasn't been reported of enormous contemporary and historical significance." Gellman agreed saying that the archive would be "really valuable for constructive research," but said "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." In June 2023 Greenwald described the archive as running to "hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more."
None of the three has published a document from it since May 2019.
On 6 June 2023, the tenth anniversary of the first Snowden story, Greenwald hosted Snowden and Poitras for a two-hour discussion on his programme System Update. They talked about the reporting, its consequences, and the state of surveillance since. The closure of the archive was not discussed, nor was the fact that nothing had been published from it in four years. Four years earlier, Poitras had released documents in which Greenwald was recorded as saying that he and Reed had decided to close the archive and that it should be kept from the public because it would look bad for him. Two years earlier, he had told New York Magazine that nobody had wanted the archive closed. Neither came up.
Rusbridger, writing in 2018:
Edward Snowden could easily have published his concerns and/or revelations himself. He chose not to. He deliberately went to journalists he thought would understand the significance of what he was disclosing and asked them to make their own judgements. It was, to some extent, an act of faith in journalism. Whether whistleblowers will behave in such a way in future is unknown. There would, of course, be no incentive in taking such disclosures to newspapers if they declined to print them.
Between August and September 2026 we tried contacting over twenty people and organisations. First Look Institute, including questions for Michael Bloom, and The Intercept. Betsy Reed, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald. The Guardian's press office and its editor-in-chief Katharine Viner. Alan Rusbridger, Ewen MacAskill, Janine Gibson, Julian Borger, Gill Phillips and Zoe Norden. ProPublica's press office. Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, Micah Lee, Erinn Clark, Lynn Dombek, and others.
Two replied. Gill Phillips, the Guardian's lawyer throughout the Snowden period, wrote to say she had retired and could not assist. The Guardian's press office said it had nothing new to share and did not routinely comment on editorial decision making.
Nobody answered a single question of substance.
If you know something about any of this, we'd like to hear from you.
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