Keeping Track of All the Snowden Documents

As more and more media outlets from all over the world continue to report on the Snowden documents, it’s harder and harder to keep track of what has been released. The EFF, ACLU, and Cryptome are all trying.

None of them is complete, I believe. Please post additions in the comments, and I will do my best to feed the information back to the compilers.

EDITED TO ADD (12/4): Here’s another compilation. And this mind map of the NSA leaks is very comprehensive.

EDITED TO ADD (12/5): Wikipedia also has an exhaustive list.

EDITED TO ADD (12/13): This is also good.

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Posted on December 3, 2013 at 6:14 AM • 29 Comments

Comments

Bauke Jan Douma • December 3, 2013 7:22 AM

Slightly off topic:

Infoworld had an apologetic article yesterday on the NSA spying program.

I posted a comment that went in its entirety: “‘Your ‘us’, does that exclude ‘them’?”.
The comment was awaiting moderation. Then they suppressed it!
Much World, little Info.

Autolykos • December 3, 2013 7:29 AM

@Bauke: They may have done this without sinister intent. I had to read your comment twice to understand it, and an overworked moderator might have mistakenly assumed it to be spam/nonsense. It is definitely not subversive enough to warrant censorship.

Bauke Jan Douma • December 3, 2013 7:59 AM

@Autolykos
I’m not talking about subversive. Just about how easy is it to sink
questions that are a tad inconventient in light of a headline that went
something like “How NSA spying in the end will benefit us all”.

@Bruce
Thanks for this ‘meta’ list already.

Roger A. Grimes • December 3, 2013 9:04 AM

Bauke Jan Douma, I’m the author of that IW article. I don’t see your comment. I’ll look into it. Can you email at roger_grimes@infoworld.com so I can respond directly to you instead of wasting more of Bruce’s blog space. I can tell you that IW doesn’t suppress opinions (that aren’t vulgar, spam, etc.). We enjoy opinions, even more so for controversial ones. Something’s going on and I’ll get to the bottom of it. Sorry you had the problem. Next time email me directly.

Clive Robinson • December 3, 2013 1:12 PM

@ Peter,

    Another almost complete collection of Snowden documents is here: http:// nsa.gov1.info/dni/

It’s funny that the NSA provide the (redacted) documents, it might be worth cross corelating them to show if the redactions are of real interest or just “over caution” by the NSA.

A thought does occure to me… Did the NSA try the relativly new field of “stochastic forensics” [1][2] to try and identify which documents Ed Snowden allegedly copied.

Mind you I’m not impressed with stochastic forensics, firstly it’s a much older technique than advertised and secondly from experiance I know it’s not sufficiently reliable for me to consider steping up as an expert witness and trying to defend it under cross examination. It suffers from the usuall forensic defect of working the “wrong way around” from (supposed) effect to (alleged) cause, and is most definatly not supportable science. Not that this will stop people trying to further debase science with this sort of nonsence as long as people will pay money for it…

[1] http://www.informationweek.com/security/management/how-digital-forensics-detects-insider-t/232300409

[2] http://www.darkreading.com/insider-threat/167801100/security/news/240002768/new-forensics-method-may-nab-insider-thieves.html

NobodySpecial • December 3, 2013 2:02 PM

@Clive Unless I am being super-reversed-double trolled here.
I don’t think nsa.gov1.info is an official US government site !

unimportant • December 3, 2013 3:43 PM

<kiddingly/>The Snowden documents could be cataloguized with a scheme like the Köchel catalogue. Mozart died an unnatural death shortly after publishing his work about secret societies.

Nick P • December 3, 2013 4:02 PM

@ NobodySpecial

Of course it’s not government website. One look at main domain should tell you.

@ Clive

Thanks for the link. I chose to play Global Thermonuclear War. It was fun. Although, Joshua was strangely absent. I feel im missing out on a WOPR of a chess game.

Charles Trew • December 3, 2013 4:08 PM 

I am interested in finding out information about activities in some smaller countries that aren't of great interest to most people (compared to the larger, industrial nations) --- like in Central America. Most stories surrounding the Snowden documents deal with Germany, France, etc. Is there any way to find out of there is material on Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, etc.?

Clive Robinson • December 3, 2013 4:15 PM

@ NobodySpecial,

No it’s me trying to do three things at once and failing at two of them, atleast I got home eventually. Moral… don’t try to get all the way across London on PubTrans when using crutches, most commuters would “kill their first born” for a seat so “in the way cripples” don’t stand a chance. For some reason whilst the UK has animal welfare during transport and anti-blood sport laws they don’t apply to the human animal. So after two hours of being pushed, cramed, crushed, stood on and subjected to prods from elbows, sholders and god alone knows what parts of other peoples considerably less than fragrant bodies and their assorted bags, brollies and personal electronics, I finaly got a chance to sit and type into the phone. And I guess my mind whilst not entirely lossing the plot got a couple of thoughts crossed….

Oh and in the UK on the TV news a “political animal” of little repute was voicing his opinion that journalists should be prosecuted to the maximum extent under the Official Secrets Act…

He basicaly had his “panties in a wad” over what the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger had said to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee,

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25205846

Clive Robinson • December 3, 2013 4:40 PM

@ Nick P,

Yup it’s not a .gov.us domain, and I was not intending to indicate that it was (there’s a missing “if” in my first sentance just befor “the NSA”).

What I was thinking about whilst being “abused” by the London commuters was what would happen if people put in FOI requests for the documents that had so far been published. What would the NSA redact and could it be used as a way of revealing further information…

Any way when you finish your WOPR of a game, drop any thoughts you have on “stocastic forensics” over on the current Squid.

NobodySpecial • December 3, 2013 5:18 PM

@Clive Robinson …and … breath …..

As the good Dr Johnson said, “when a man is tired of the Northern Line he is tired of life”

BP • December 3, 2013 6:58 PM

I had the unfortunate privilege of seeing all that cryptome.org had up for a few hours. I’m sure someone cached those, but they were quite distressing. John Young claims he took them down because PRC was scraping his server. He turned them over to that privacy board run by insiders. Anybody got those? They’re pretty disgusting.

William Lee • December 4, 2013 6:10 AM

Would archive.org make sense as a public repository? Or do they frown on anything in a legal grey area like that.

Anura • December 4, 2013 5:00 PM

Here’s a new report, that I don’t believe I’ve heard before as far as Snowden leaks are concerned:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

…

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

Anura • December 4, 2013 5:23 PM

The problem with the attitude of “It’s the NSAs job to spy on foreigners, as long as they don’t spy on citizens of the US!” is that when combined with the idea of “It’s the GCHQ’s job to spy on foreigners, as long as they don’t spy on citizens of the UK!” and you have information sharing between the two organizations, then it doesn’t matter whether the NSA/GCHQ itself spies on US/UK citizens, as the end result is that the NSA/GCHQ still has all of the same information available to them.

We need to stop thinking of the world as a bunch of countries in competition with each other, and start thinking of ourselves as part of a global community; cosmopolitans, rather than patriots.

MW • December 4, 2013 7:35 PM

I’ve wondered about the security of the reporters who have this document stash. They’re releasing bits slowly, both to avoid irresponsible (in their judgement) disclosures, and to draw out the newsworthiness.
There are very well resourced entities (primarily intelligence agencies) which do not feel bound by local laws and would very much like the full stash right now. While I expect the reporters are taking many precautions (air gaps, encrypted hard drives etc.) it is hard to imagine they can be secure against such opponents.

Nick P • December 4, 2013 8:02 PM

@ Anura

“We need to stop thinking of the world as a bunch of countries in competition with each other, and start thinking of ourselves as part of a global community; cosmopolitans, rather than patriots.”

But we are a bunch of countries in competition with each other. Well, China, Russia, UK, and US definitely are. It’s both part of culture and how these countries got where they are. A country or a few countries that take on the worldview you suggest will usually be outfoxed by the others that take a more pragmatic view. This is especially true for rare resources, such as neodymium or oil, that are very profitable for the country owning them.

So, the spying will continue and should. Nonetheless, the country can still pull all kinds of covert crap on competing countries without doing blanket surveillance of their own population. Americans can be pro-spying for national advantage while opposing (or heavily restricting) domestic spying.

Figureitout • December 5, 2013 12:25 AM

Nick P Re: Anura’s admirable vision
–People should be able to dream, and there are still a lot of civilians worldwide that one can connect w/ and have bigger visions. This is a big problem. If we conduct trade w/ other countries and their products are compromised (or our’s of course), or we have to turn our country into a police state to prevent agents from infiltrating the political system and possibly having an agent-controlled president that wrecks the country (my tin-foil hat will not be removed, so don’t ask me to take it off).

Resource wars are another problem that I don’t see a very easy solution to besides expanding to other planets. Killing brave soldiers and scientists, wasting energy and polluting the planet are short-term idiotic behaviors.

We (the US) have already dropped not one, but two nukes on a country; nukes are blowing up in our atmosphere, we can continue down this path and fight to death instead of expanding. We’ll just all die and maybe other life forms will view our “dead rock” and ponder if life ever existed there…

VinnyG • December 6, 2013 2:50 PM

@William Lee re “archives.org”

Unfortunately, as discussed in a recent edition of the ACM Risks Digest (don’t have the edition # handy) all it takes to effect a retroactive take down of a page on the Wayback Machine is publishing the appropriate exclusion in robots.txt. That was a revelation (and shock) to me, and as a result, archive.org fell several steps in my regard. Pretty much off the ladder and into the shite, in fact…

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