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What Happened to the Snowden Archive
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- DeepHorus
The Snowden archive has gone silent. The last document from the cache was published on 29 May 2019 by The Intercept; no outlet has released anything since. The Guardian stopped in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. The Intercept closed its archive in March 2019 and released the final batch eleven weeks later.
The archive's origins date to late 2012. Snowden contacted Glenn Greenwald in December 2012, then filmmaker Laura Poitras. On 21 May 2013 he gave Poitras and Barton Gellman keys to an encrypted archive called Pandora containing about 50,000 documents. A physical package from Hawaii reached Poitras through intermediaries in May 2013.
Snowden warned Poitras about a 'single point of failure' and urged her to spread copies. She gave one to Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, one to an unidentified person, and a third to someone unknown. Dale Maharidge also kept a copy. Greenwald received the Pandora copy on 1 June 2013; other outlets obtained material via the Guardian and Poitras.
The archive remains largely unreported. Greenwald said on 13 March 2019 that he and Poitras possess full copies, as do other individuals and institutions. Poitras said in 2022 that the archive 'still exists, and there is still more to report.' Greenwald said in 2023 it contains 'hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more.'
Neither journalist has published anything from the archive in seven years, and neither has explained why. The silence is striking after the initial revelations about mass surveillance. It leaves the public without answers about what remains classified.
The archive's future is uncertain. Poitras insists the material remains relevant, but no timeline for publication has been offered. Whether new reporting emerges may depend on legal, political, or editorial factors that have not been made public.
