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 But years after his act of extraordinary courage, the Snowden archive remains largely unpublished.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 A doctoral thesis by American investigative journalist and post-doctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum has now revealed unpublished information from the Snowden archive.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.
Snowden asserted and still does that he deleted his own copies once Greenwald et al. got their copies, well before he had to flee Hong Kong and ended up trapped in Russia.
Remember, it was the US who trapped him in Russia by revoking his passport – an international crime in and of itself, rendering him stateless which no country should do to its citizens, no matter what crimes they have allegedly commited – and he had no intention of ending up there; he was trying to get to Chile I believe, and the EU did the unprecedented step of force-grounding their equivalent of Air Force One, with their president on board, thinking Snowden was a passenger.
Imagine if the POTUS had his plane accompanied by fighter jets to force-land in any other nation. The response would have been explosive, literally. Such hypocrisy that they just wave off other nations’ sovereignty and diplomatic norms on the treatment of foreign leaders so easily.
Snowden asserted and still does that he deleted his own copies once Greenwald et al. got their copies, well before he had to flee Hong Kong and ended up trapped in Russia.
Remember, it was the US who trapped him in Russia by revoking his passport – an international crime in and of itself, rendering him stateless which no country should do to its citizens, no matter what crimes they have allegedly commited – and he had no intention of ending up there; he was trying to get to Chile I believe, and the EU did the unprecedented step of force-grounding their equivalent of Air Force One, with their president on board, thinking Snowden was a passenger.
Imagine if the POTUS had his plane accompanied by fighter jets to force-land in any other nation. The response would have been explosive, literally. Such hypocrisy that they just wave off other nations’ sovereignty and diplomatic norms on the treatment of foreign leaders so easily.
So now I’m supposed to trust what Snowden says? That’s pretty funny.