Citizen Journalists start your engines.

May 16, 2016 9:46 AM

The Intercept is broadening access to the Snowden documents. Here´s why.
We encourage other journalists, researchers, and interested parties to comb through these documents, along with future published batches, to find additional material of interest. Others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not. A primary objective of these batch releases is to make that kind of exploration possible.
The Intercept’s first SIDtoday release.
posted by adamvasco (25 comments total)

   Consistent with the requirements of our agreement with our source, our editors and reporters have carefully examined each document, redacted names of low-level functionaries and other information that could impose serious harm on innocent individuals, and given the NSA an opportunity to comment on the documents to be published (the NSA’s comments resulted in no redactions other than two names of relatively low-level employees that we agreed, consistent with our long-standing policy, to redact). [...]
   There are still many documents of legitimate interest to the public that can and should be disclosed. There are also documents in the archive that we do not believe should be published because of the severe harm they would cause innocent people (e.g., private communications intercepted by NSA, the disclosure of which would destroy privacy rights; and documents containing government speculation about bad acts committed by private individuals (typically from marginalized communities), the disclosure of which would permanently destroy reputations).
   An archive of this significance and size obviously presents complicated questions about how best to report on it. There is rarely one easy, obvious answer how to do it. [...]

This. No matter what your opinion is on the Snowden documents themselves, this is an example of integrity in journalism, and something that every other media agency worldwide should carefully think about.

An important note is that this is not about enabling citizen journalism; this isn't intended as feed-stock for every blogger who wants a pass, even if they may do so anyway. "Citizen journalism" can raise awareness on things actual journalism is missing or ignoring, but by and large when you ask amateurs to do a job you get an amateur result, and journalism is no exception to that. This is about enabling wider access to the already important documents -- documents that The Intercept has already proven itself to be excellent at bringing forward to the world for discussion -- and about enabling a greater degree of information-sharing about the documents between established media entities that has so far been difficult to achieve.
posted by mystyk at 10:17 AM on May 16, 2016 [17 favorites]

What a great start to read and understand the content in this thread, with the framing of what is truly important being pulled out for n00bs like myself who are not from this profession. Thankyou mystyk (and thanks adamvasco)
posted by infini at 10:21 AM on May 16, 2016

( Not everybody is in America. I would posit that some citizen journalists are actually very good and are such because they work in areas where the media is either heavily censored or in the hands of the few whose interests are the same as the rulers.)
posted by adamvasco at 10:29 AM on May 16, 2016 [10 favorites]

so, they've provided access to the internal NSA newsletter to intrepid citizen journalists? the company newsletter? that's beyond pathetic, especially with all the self congratulatory sermons from Greenwald et al.

what was done to Assange and Wilileaks has been an important object lesson as to what happens to you if you actually release embarrassing info to the public.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:36 AM on May 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Not quite sure how to phrase this without sliding into wacko reactionary, but isn't this release of a newsletter from 2003 getting more like "citizen historical commentary"?
posted by sammyo at 10:47 AM on May 16, 2016

Am I to assume it is Greenwald who is cited in italic, deciding what is ok and not ok to make available? And, if so, how are we to judge is ability to make such decisions? He has a bias, I note, in posting material about Israel that is non-Snowden, and which seems to be lacking in objectivity.
posted by Postroad at 11:02 AM on May 16, 2016

This is such a fucking nothing release. We're going to get gradual access to 13 year old internal newsletters that are pre-sanitized for mass consumption?

Thanks a lot!
posted by GreyboxHero at 11:03 AM on May 16, 2016

2003-05-29_SIDToday_-_Free_Bananas_in_the_Kitchen.pdf
posted by rlk at 11:16 AM on May 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

I disagree that this is a nothing release. Is it of an import such that it'll change the course of politics or diplomacy today? No. But peeking behind the curtain is important almost all the time, when it comes to government, and hugely so when we talk about an agency so almost completely beyond oversight.

Some of this is useful just to point out how out of control the classification culture is in government and the NSA. Take for example this little newsletter blurb about a procedural process, downgrading COMINT.

It's quick to look at, but basically it says this is different than sanitizing (redacting) and who can do it. Which is pretty uninteresting, but here's the bottom tag:

DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS
TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL
DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108

That little "how we do business" chunk got slapped with a limitation that nobody outside the seekret klub gets to see it till it's old enough to have graduated from college. That's just fucking madness, and I contend that the amount of business that government chooses to do where its citizenry can't see it is hugely significant.
posted by phearlez at 11:20 AM on May 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

And, if so, how are we to judge is ability to make such decisions? He has a bias, I note, in posting material about Israel that is non-Snowden, and which seems to be lacking in objectivity.

I like Greenwald a lot, but I wouldn't call him objective, and I'm not sure he would call himself objective. He engages in journalism activism, and has been doing so for a very long time. And not to disrespect your opinions on his Israeli writing (which I'm not intimate with), but it's pretty hard to write anything about Israel without being called non-objective and indeed pissing large numbers of people off.
posted by el io at 11:30 AM on May 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

2003-05-29_SIDToday_-_Someone_took_my_Bananas_from_the_Kitchen.pdf
posted by el io at 11:31 AM on May 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

For fuck's sake people, Greenwald's name isn't even mentioned in this series:

The SIDtoday Files was produced by a core team at First Look Media Works, led by The Intercept’s Technology Analyst Micah Lee and Research Editor for Investigations Margot Williams.

Project contributors include Research Editor Alleen Brown, Associate Editor Andrea Jones, Design Director Stéphane Elbaz, Software Engineer Raby Yuson, Senior Software Engineer Joshua Thayer, and Product Technology Lead Tom Conroy.

Project oversight was provided by The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed, Research Director Lynn Dombek, Deputy Editor Ryan Tate, and General Counsel Lynn Oberlander.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:53 AM on May 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Greenwald is the author of the article.

Ok, sure, he did write the press release. Nothing says he was involved in editing or redacting these documents. Anyway I don't think a near-verbatim doc dump is the optimal place to pull the journalistic integrity card.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:11 PM on May 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

2003-05-29_SIDToday_-_This_Is_Just_To_Say_(Bananas).pdf
posted by The Bellman at 12:26 PM on May 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Getting access to old SIDToday copies is an interesting window on the banality of evil.

But I wish I could get past The Intercept's paragraph-based scrolling to read more.
posted by scruss at 12:36 PM on May 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Apparently they're available here:

https://github.com/firstlookmedia/sidtoday/
posted by I-baLL at 1:09 PM on May 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Released as a bunch of PDFs... this is fine.
posted by ethansr at 2:13 PM on May 16, 2016

There are other programs that display PDFs.
posted by indubitable at 2:18 PM on May 16, 2016

My take, again:
Greenwald is I believe the lead author, writer, head of Intercept. If I said he has a bias against Israel, I say that knowing that I have a pro Israel position but have no difficulty in finding fault with any number of things that are done by Israel; Greenwald, by contrast, seems to find all things done by Israel wrong with no suggestion that anything bad done by the Palestinians is ever worth noting. Example: Hamas sends two thousand rockets at Israel. That is ignored. Israel attacks Gaza, and that is very bad.
But that said, there is this about the site: The site combines personal views, advocacy journalism on the one hand; and then also puts is materials gathered that are revealing of what often is kept from the public. In short, you have to distinguish between hard news and editorialism.

As for the dump itself, some site some time ago pointed out that Intercept is not making available with any haste all the materials it says it has but seems to dole it out to keep people returning to the site. The Snowden materials may be dripped to the public till it begins to resemble a morphine drip and we are lulled by what we see.
posted by Postroad at 2:29 PM on May 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think until we learn of a connection, the Snowden Documents are the furthest thing from an I-P debate. If you have a relevant point to make on the basis of an ad hominem complaint against Greenwald it would be good to make that clear.
posted by rhizome at 2:54 PM on May 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

Here's a pdf compilation of the 2K3 SID files.
posted by chainlinkspiral at 3:16 PM on May 16, 2016

I am just now digging into this and I am amazed at how good it looks. Here is the first 24K golden nugget I found in the story by Lee and Williams:

At the United Nations, readers were told, “timely SIGINT played a critical role” in winning adoption of resolutions related to Iraq, including by providing “insights into the nuances of internal divisions among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.”
posted by bukvich at 3:21 PM on May 16, 2016

I respect their concern for victims of surveillance, and the very difficult circumstances they are operating in, but I think everybody would be better served by the certainty of a full release. Maybe compromise on a staged, rolling release (everything up to 2006 this year, up to 2017 next year, etc) but give people the assurance that it will all come out and that there will be no nasty surprises after that.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:05 PM on May 16, 2016

"And because NYT and PP had no source relationship and thus no duty to honor agreements"
posted by jeffburdges at 1:32 PM on May 17, 2016

"Possibly the world's worst book review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, reviewed by the NSA"
posted by jeffburdges at 1:41 PM on May 17, 2016