The Snowden Archive Went Dark in 2019 — and No One Will Say Why

The trove of NSA and GCHQ documents Edward Snowden leaked in 2013 has effectively gone silent. After a staggered wind-down—the Guardian stopped publishing in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, the New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015—only The Intercept kept releasing material, and it closed its archive in March 2019 before dropping a final batch that May. Since 29 May 2019, no journalist, outlet, or institution anywhere has published a single new document from the archive.

The silence is not for lack of material. Snowden distributed copies deliberately to guard against a “single point of failure,” sending encrypted sets to Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Glenn Greenwald, plus additional copies to trusted holders (some of whom likely lack the decryption keys). The Guardian’s own cache reportedly ran to roughly 58,000 documents; Greenwald has described the full archive as “hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more,” and Poitras said as recently as 2022 that it “still exists” and contains material of “enormous contemporary and historical significance.” Yet neither has published anything from it in seven years, and neither has explained the freeze.

The piece also revisits the pressure that shaped early coverage. Within a day of the Guardian’s first story, UK defence officials issued a confidential D-notice to major British outlets, and academic analysis of the two years that followed found most of the press amplifying pro-surveillance sources while tabloids attacked Snowden personally. In July 2013, under pressure from Downing Street, Guardian executives destroyed the London copies under GCHQ supervision—a move an editor later called “purely symbolic” since the reporting continued from the US. The unanswered question is why, with so much reportedly unreported, the archive’s remaining custodians have gone quiet.