He risked his neck. When Edward Snowden chose to expose the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)'s mass surveillance Leviathan, and that of its British counterpart, GCHQ, 10 years ago, he put his life on the line. And he has always declared he has never regretted it. But years after his act of extraordinary courage, the Snowden archive remains largely unpublished. He trusted in journalists to decide what to publish. In an article published in June 2023, by Guardian Pulitzer prize winner Ewen MacAskill - who flew to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to meet Edward Snowden - McAskill confirmed that most of the archive has not been made public. "In the end, we published only about 1 percent of the document,” he wrote. What does the 99 percent of the Snowden archive contain? A decade on, it remains shrouded in secrecy. A doctoral thesis by American investigative journalist and post-doctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum has now revealed unpublished information from the Snowden archive. These revelations go back to a decade but they remain of indisputable public interest: the NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) - the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications - as a successful example of a "SIGINT enabled" CPU vendor. Cavium, now owned by Marvell said it does not implement back doors for any government. · the NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: "you talk, we listen". The NSA and/or GCHQ has also compromised "Key European LI [lawful interception] systems. · among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.
A decade after Snowden exposed NSA’s mass surveillance in cooperation with the British GCHQ, only about 1 percent of the documents have been published, but three major facts can finally be revealed thanks to a doctoral thesis in applied cryptography by Jacob Appelbaum.
Without access to classified information, how can a distinction be made between “foreign assets” and US citizens that are suspected of working as “foreign assets”?
What snowden released went well beyond that. He gave up critical information used against countries like Russia. He exposed way more than just the spying on US citizens. He gave out secrets of how we conduct intelligence gathering on our adversaries, that we need to be gathering intelligence on. Operations that were 100% not on US soil, (which the NSA and CIA aren’t even allowed to operate on, though the Patriot Act somewhat redefined that), and operations that were 100% not involving US citizens, (which most intelligence gathering doesn’t.
Without access to classified information, how can a distinction be made between “foreign assets” and US citizens that are suspected of working as “foreign assets”?
What snowden released went well beyond that. He gave up critical information used against countries like Russia. He exposed way more than just the spying on US citizens. He gave out secrets of how we conduct intelligence gathering on our adversaries, that we need to be gathering intelligence on. Operations that were 100% not on US soil, (which the NSA and CIA aren’t even allowed to operate on, though the Patriot Act somewhat redefined that), and operations that were 100% not involving US citizens, (which most intelligence gathering doesn’t.