Cryptome, the infamous repository of daylighted classified information run by John Young and a number of other volunteers, posted a few interesting tweets on their feed about two weeks back suggesting that they may have possession of some of the unreleased (and unredacted) Snowden material and that they were going to release it in July to prevent a “war” – his later tweet clarified that he was speaking about the current ISIS situation, stating that “ISIS war would not be happening … [if documents were released] … July war not averted.”
Well, we are now well and truly within the month of July and I had yet to see anything more on this subject so I figured I would visit Cryptome to see if there has been any movement. On the site’s front page is a link to a PDF which is effectively a demand for the documents to be released, addressed to the relevant news organizations involved. So I don’t believe that this is going to happen, barring the intervention of a ‘safety’ (one assumes that Snowden gave a few of his most trusted buddies the raw material to release in the event that he was disposed of).
Unfortunately, it still remains in the interests of the newspapers involved to keep the documents and slowly roll out the stories over an extended period of time. I suspect that after the Guardian’s UK office was raided that the news organizations involved have been, uh, ‘briefed’ on what journalism really is all about in the 21st century, remembering that the government could potentially make things difficult for their newspaper companies (or easier for their competitors).
Young’s Cryptome has always been an excellent resource, but I just don’t think that this will even come to close to attaining the level of interest and inertia that such a protest would need in order to get the attention of the powers that be. However, I suspect that the documents will eventually see the light of public scrutiny. Edward Snowden isn’t an unintelligent man, and he would have ensured that multiple people with different agendas had access to the source material. One can’t keep a united front together indefinetely when there are ego’s at work.
Mike the Crypto Goat 