It’s been years since whistleblower Edward Snowden first pulled back the curtains on the NSA’s mass surveillance program, and we still haven’t seen the entire trove of documents he discovered. Today, a new cache is being made available to the public.
The Intercept has released the first of several installments of internal newsletters from the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) division. The entire set of newsletters, titled SIDToday, spans more than a decade beginning after the 9/11 terror attack in 2001.
The first set contains 166 documents from 2003 and is available to download from a special section on The Intercept’s site as well as from this GitHub repository.
What can you expect to find in the archive? The Intercept notes that there’s a wide range of content, ranging “from serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts’ trips and vacations, with much in between. Many are self-serving and boastful, designed to justify budgets or impress supervisors. Others contain obvious errors or mindless parroting of public source material. But some SIDtoday articles have been the basis of significant revelations from the archive.”
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In addition to releasing these documents publicly, The Intercept has figured out a way to allow journalists from other publications to access them in a manner that is “consistent with the responsibility demanded by these materials and our agreement with our source.”
The site also encourages others to pore through the documents in search of clues leading to stories that haven’t yet been told. It will periodically release more batches of newsletters in the future in the hopes of piecing together the whole story of how the NSA came to spy on US citizens.
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