[garciasn]

> Why was only 1% of the documents published, in the end? “The documents are not like the WikiLeaks ones from the US state department, which were written by diplomats and, for the most part, easily understandable,” said Ewen MacAskill. “The Snowden files are largely technical, with lots of codewords and jargon that is hard to decipher. There are pages and pages of that which the public would not be interested in. There are also documents that relate to operational matters. Snowden said from the start he wanted us to report on issues related to mass surveillance, not operational matters. So we stuck to that.”

Ignoring the operational limitation requirement (of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%), a capable public can make this determination; we do not need journalists doing it for us. I am uninterested in the journalistic value of these documents; I am interested in the public value of potentially knowing the content of those documents and how the government is surveilling us and/or abusing their authority.

>“The bottom line is that Snowden is facing charges under the Espionage Act. If he was ever to return to the US and face trial, the documents could be used against him.

Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. He believed he was acting in the best interests on the public and is it NOT the job of journalists to protect a known source entity; they are to protect unknown sources.

Release MORE of the files, your profits and/or biased concerns for the journalistic value of the information shared be dammed. There is WAY more at stake.

[criddell]

They came to an agreement with Snowden and should honor that. We might want to see the rest, but I think long term it’s better for leakers to know journalists are trustworthy.

[garciasn]

The reasoning in the article is primarily about how the journalists felt there was fatigue/reduced demand/lack of ability to understand/etc, aside from the comment about censoring the operational pieces, there was little mention of Snowden's wishes.

So, based on the article, we shouldn't be blindly trustful of the journalists' thoughts on this matter; they are clearly biased toward the information published as well as the value it brings their brand (individual or employer).

[schoen]

I'm surprised that they didn't bring up their agreement with Snowden in this context. Maybe the interviewer somehow didn't ask them about that aspect?

[schoen]

Yeah, if journalists simply bypassed the agreement, a future source might say "OK, I want to expose this bad thing that a government agency is doing, but if I do, the journalists will probably be careless about it and people will get killed" (or whatever the case may be).

If Snowden himself had had to redact everything ahead of time, or study everything in fine detail beforehand to determine all the implications of publishing it, he wouldn't have been able to leak nearly as much material.

[Shawnj2]

Yep a huge reason (some) people don’t like Snowden is because he leaked extremely classified information. I’m sure he himself only wanted to give away information that exposed the NSA’s surveillance network and only actually distributing the documents he leaked that are relevant to that point is his goal

[cheschire]

I agree this comes off as patronizing and profit driven. Only 1% of the documents are relevant today. They're holding the 99% until they feel they're relevant to current events so they can break the story.

I wonder what motivated this story to be published.

[saulpw]

> a capable public can make this determination

The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.

[jerf]

The public is not capable of creating an open source ecosystem of highly technical software spanning almost every software genre with multiple options across decades.

The public is not just the bottom most or the average member. It's everyone. If "the public" is not capable of understanding this information neither are the members of "the public" normally producing and consuming this information.

[johannes1234321]

True the average person can't do that.

However there are many organisations who can analyze different aspects from different perspectives and pull out consumable information from it.

By having the raw material available this then can be cross-ckecked. If it's kept secret you need complete trust.

[entropicdrifter]

Unfortunately there are several times as many organizations who will take an undecipherable wall of text as an excuse to push their pre-existing beliefs and agendas with cherry-picked out of context quotes, intentionally misleading interpretations, and bad faith arguments.

Bad faith actors would use it and a pile of techniques used mainly by religions and cults in order to try to seize power.

[saghm]

Sure, but they do that anyways, and it's not like holding the documents in secrecy is somehow crippling the ability of bad-faith actors to act in bad faith. If anything, it allows them to claim things _without_ good faith actors being able to scrutinize their claims.

[johannes1234321]

You don't need documents to tell lies. You can invent arbitrary secret sources. However you need documents to disprove lies.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I for one do not wish to give America's enemies access to all of our classified information.

[johannes1234321]

For that it's too late.

The docetns are at British The Guardian and German Der Spiegel and the person extracting those initially sits in Russia and who knows who got copies or extracted them.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> Russian parliament’s defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did share intelligence” with his government.

https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...

[pseudalopex]

The deputy chairman claimed. Not the committee conceded. Whoever wrote conceded missed or wished to obscure the deputy chairman could have lied. Failing to get anything from Snowden would have embarrassed Russian security services. Or it could have been an assumption if the English translation is accurate.[1]

At least this claim could be probed. Most claims in the report relied on proven liars.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/06/29/483890378/during-tenure-in-ru...

[noman-land]

Whether you like it or not, this is not your determination to make.

[mardifoufs]

If that's how you perceive the public, that's an inherently anti democratic view imo. If they can't read documents that journalists have access to, how could they be given the power to decide who is leading them?

[mock-possum]

We are all the public. Including the people who wrote these documents originally.

It can’t be that hard.

[olddustytrail]

Yes I am. You might not be but don't I count as "the public"?

[jimjimjim]

This is the crux of it. You, me, that guy, we might be capable. But the Public certainly is not capable, never has been, never will be.

[logifail]

> Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world

Just to put the end of that sentence in context:

"Privacy International's 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year. Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being 'endemic surveillance societies'. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States."[0]

There are many, many reasons to criticize Russia - now more than ever - but those of us in the West should reflect on why we rate so poorly on this, too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance

[RobertRoberts]

Snowden was _trapped_ in Russia. He was on his way to a country with no extradition and his passport was revoked, it's worth looking up to know that he didn't chose Russia.

[garciasn]

I said he resides there and it’s ironic; I didn’t say he chose it.

[giantg2]

"of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%"

It very well could be. People with a background jnnsocial engineering know there are many small and seemingly innocuous pieces of information that could be useful to an attacker.

[YetAnotherNick]

Yes, wouldn't the document still be used against him even if he just leaked to journalists.

[kylebenzle]

Exactly, the reasons given are simply not logical.