Schneier - First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives

The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media -- home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald -- is shutting down access to the Snowden archives.

The Intercept was the home for Greenwald's subset of Snowden's NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I don't know the details of how the archive was stored, but it was offline and well secured -- and it was available to journalists for research purposes. Many stories were published based on those archives over the years, albeit fewer in recent years.

The article doesn't say what "shutting down access" means, but my guess is that it means that First Look Media will no longer make the archive available to outside journalists, and probably not to staff journalists, either. Reading between the lines, I think they will delete what they have.

This doesn't mean that we're done with the documents. Glenn Greenwald tweeted:

Both Laura & I have full copies of the archives, as do others. The Intercept has given full access to multiple media orgs, reporters & researchers. I've been looking for the right partner -- an academic institution or research facility -- that has the funds to robustly publish.

I'm sure there are still stories in those NSA documents, but with many of them a decade or more old, they are increasingly history and decreasingly current events. Every capability discussed in the documents needs to be read with a "and then they had ten years to improve this" mentality.

Eventually it'll all become public, but not before it is 100% history and 0% current events.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/03/first_look_medi.html

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