Only five slides out of 41 have been made public, no more will be shared

Jun 10, 2013 22:48 GMT  ·  By

Edward Snowden's revelation of the US government's massive surveillance program has been shocking enough, even if it wasn't particularly surprising. Plenty of people have been talking about this for years and have been ignored.

But the entire mess started from just a few documents. One showed how the US intelligence agencies, NSA in particular, were getting all the phone records of all Verizon subscribers, indiscriminately. 

Another was a PowerPoint deck describing PRISM, a surveillance program used to gather data from US Internet companies, directly from their servers. The companies involved later disputed the claims. 

However, of that PowerPoint deck, only five slides have been revealed so far, out of 41. And neither the Washington Post nor The Guardian, the only publications that have gotten their hands on the documents, have any intention of releasing the rest.

That's because, they say, the material is too sensitive to publish. They won't even talk much about what's in those other slides that is so powerful or dangerous that even they won't publish it.

Snowden wanted the entire deck to be published. In fact, he made that specific request to the Washington Post, which said it could not grant it.

As for why the publications are refraining from publishing the rest of the slides, apparently, it's because they detail specific methods through which the NSA and the US intelligence amass and intercept all the data they gather. 

Obviously, that information would be extremely useful to anyone not wanting to have their data intercepted by US intelligence. But those very same methods could be used against average citizens, and perhaps those citizens would like to know what they are.

Still, if two respected publications decided that the public would not be best served by releasing all the data, or that the potential damage outweighs the benefits, they must have had good reason.

That said, WikiLeaks has made it very clear that it would have published the entire document as Snowden requested. Yet, even WikiLeaks censored some of the more sensitive data when it revealed some of its biggest leaks.