14 DAY TRIAL // The archive of files stolen by Edward Snowden from the NSA is about to be released, Glen Greenwald, founder of The Intercept, has announced today.
Greenwald is the one of the first journalists to have interviewed Snowden after he decided to reveal all of the NSA's secret operations.
The data that Snowden passed to Greenwald and other journalists was so vast and wide-ranging that even today, years later, the reporter and his colleagues from The Intercept haven't managed to analyze it in its totality, let alone publish it online.
Greenwald, The Intercept can't sift through the data fast enough
The initial plan was to keep the leaked data private and have trained reporters look at it, analyze it, verify it, and then write stories about their findings for an online newspaper, called The Intercept, created specifically for this purpose.
Twenty-six months after launch, Greenwald and his fellows are still publishing stories from Snowden's data dump. But they're not planning to keep doing this forever.
After the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the entire Panama Papers leak online last week and was greeted with positive feedback, Greenwald decided that it was time to do the same.
The journalist has informed us today that The Intercept will be publishing a large part of the Snowden files, called SIDtoday, an NSA internal newsletter. SID stands for Signals Intelligence Directorate.
First Snowden files dump includes the SIDtoday NSA newsletter
"The Intercept’s first SIDtoday release comprises 166 articles, including all articles published between March 31, 2003, when SIDtoday began, and June 30, 2003, plus installments of all article series begun during this period through the end of the year," The Intercept has announced today.
The goal is to have as many eyes looking at the data as possible and thus hurry up the process of uncovering all of the NSA shady, questionable, and sometimes illegal operations.
Interested users can get their hands on some of the data via GitHub. Greenwald has also announced that this is only the first batch and that they'll release more of the Snowden files in the upcoming future.
In the past, Greenwald also allowed other news outlets to sift through the Snowden data, but only selected media agencies such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica, and the Guardian.