What happened to the Snowden archive
Published on 20 Sept 2026
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it closed its archive in March 2019. Eleven weeks later, on 29 May 2019, it released what would become the final batch of documents from the archive. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the Snowden archive.
Snowden started reaching out to journalists months before having any material to share. In December 2012, he contacted Guardian columnist and former attorney Glenn Greenwald, requesting that he set up a secure communication channel, though Greenwald didn’t know how to do so.[1] After a second attempt in January failed to make progress, Snowden shifted his focus to Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker. Poitras then teamed up with an investigative journalist Barton Gellman.[1]
Snowden shared the archive gradually. On 31 March 2013 he sent Poitras a link to an encrypted file called astro_noise,[2] which she downloaded and filmed herself doing so, but had no key to open it.[3] On 10 May Snowden posted a box from Hawaii to a Brooklyn address he had asked her to supply. It went to Jessica Bruder, a journalist who had agreed to receive a package without being told what it was, and who passed it unopened to Dale Maharidge, and then Maharidge handed it to Poitras on 15 May.
On 21 May 2013 Snowden sent Poitras and Gellman the keys to an encrypted archive called Pandora containing about 50,000 documents.[4][5][1]
At some point in late May, Snowden warned Poitras about what he called a “single point of failure,” and urged her to get copies of the material into other hands. She distributed three. One went to Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with a note asking him to hold the material and not to give it to anyone but Greenwald, and only if Greenwald asked in person. One went to a person who has asked not to be identified. The third went to someone who remains unknown. Maharidge kept a copy himself, saying in 2017 that he still had it.[6] Aside from Poitras, Gellman, and Greenwald, it’s unclear whether the others holding copies can actually read the documents, since the copies are likely encrypted and they may not have the key.
Greenwald received the Pandora copy from Poitras on 1 June 2013, on the way to the airport,[1] and read it for the first time on the flight to Hong Kong.[7] The Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill was handed the GCHQ material in Hong Kong,[1] and brought it to the Guardian’s London office.[8] Der Spiegel obtained their archive from Poitras in that summer.[9] The New York Times and ProPublica got theirs from the Guardian.[10][11]
Greenwald said in 13 March 2019 that he and Poitras “individually and independently, continue to possess full copies of the archive, as do other individuals and institutions.”[12]
Poitras said in 2022 that the archive “still exists, and there is still more to report,” describing “a vast amount of information that hasn’t been reported of enormous contemporary and historical significance.” Greenwald said in 2023 that the archive runs to “hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more.” But neither has published anything from it in seven years, and neither has explained why.
Snowden gave a large portion of the archive to the Scottish journalist Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong, containing “tens of thousands of documents.” In Citizenfour, Snowden is filmed handing GCHQ material to MacAskill in the Hong Kong hotel room. Snowden describes it as coming from the agency’s internal wiki — “at the top secret, you know, super classified level, where anybody working intelligence can work on anything they want” — and adds: “That’s what this is. I’m giving it to you. You can make the decision on that, what’s appropriate, what’s not.” MacAskill brought his copy to the Guardian’s London office.[8] The Guardian later stated that their archive contained around 58,000 documents.
The Guardian published its first Snowden story with a document from the archive on 6 June 2013. The following day, UK defence officials issued a confidential D notice to every major British media outlet “in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US.”
The DPBAC committee (the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee) issuing D notices runs what was then called the DA-Notice system, a voluntary arrangement dating to 1912, under which news organisations consult the Ministry of Defence before publishing material touching national security. In 2013, the serving secretary was Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance.
The D Notice was issued to a press already inclined to cooperate. Reviewing the academic literature in 2018, Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay from Bangor University noted that:
According to Bakir and McStay the alignment was close to uniform. The Daily Mail, Mirror, Star, Telegraph, Sun and Times were coded pro-surveillance. Only the Independent, the i and the People leaned the other way. The Guardian and the Express were balanced. What that meant in practice, they write, was that “citizens’ privacy rights and surveillance regulation were minimally discussed, while mass surveillance was normalised by suggesting that it is necessary for national security.” Prominent press themes “were that social media companies should do more to fight terrorism, and that while surveillance of politicians is problematic, surveillance of the public should be increased.”
The Daily Mail – which published more articles on Snowden than any other British outlet besides the Guardian – is a prime example of this trend. In the six months following the initial leak, the outlet concentrated on Snowden’s “lavish lifestyle on the run and his sexual appeal.” As Bakir and McStay note, these tactics appeared designed to discredit or draw attention away from the GCHQ revelations he exposed.
Following pressure from Downing Street and Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, three Guardian executives destroyed the computers holding their London-based archive in a basement on 20 July 2013, six weeks after their first Snowden story. Two GCHQ technicians supervised the destruction. The paper kept the action secret[11][13], only making it public a month later on August 19.
Paul Johnson, then deputy editor of the Guardian and one of the three who destroyed the computers, later called the destruction “purely a symbolic act”, because the government knew “that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn’t changed anything.”
The DPBAC committee’s own minutes record something happening in the same weeks. Vallance told that “at the outset the Guardian had avoided engaging with the DA-Notice system before publishing the first tranche”, that as a member of the Newspaper Publishers Association it “was obliged to seek (but not necessarily to accept) DA Notice advice under the terms of the DA Notice code,” and that this failure “was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.” Towards the end of July 2013, he said, the Guardian “had begun to seek and accept DA Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details.”
The Guardian’s then editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was publicly questioned on 3 December 2013, in the Home Affairs Committee, about the Guardian’s Snowden reporting. “In terms of publishing documents, I think we have published 26,” Rusbridger said, “I would not be expecting us to be publishing a huge amount more. With 26 over six months, I would say it has been a trickle.” Rusbridger said that during the last six months “there have been more than 100 contacts” with UK and US government agencies.[14] “We were in continuous contact with the intelligence agencies and the White House,” Rusbridger writes in 2018.[15] When asked about how many of the 58,000 documents were read, Rusbridger replied “I could not tell you. I don’t know.”[16]
Rusbridger told the Home Affairs Committee that of roughly 35 stories published, the Guardian had consulted the authorities on all but one. Of Vallance he said: “We have, in fact, collaborated with him since and he has been at The Guardian to talk to all our reporters.” Rusbridger added in 2018 that Vallance was in time invited into the Guardian’s morning conference.[17] Rusbridger’s account of the arrangement is that Vallance was reviewing stories as they came and rarely objecting.[18] Gellman wrote that the Guardian “killed some of its stories for legal reasons and delayed others for months.”[19]
Three months later, on 27 February 2014, the Guardian published its last Snowden documents. Over nine months it had published around 30 of the 58,000 documents it held — 0.05%. Rusbridger would later describe the episode as the story with the biggest global impact in the Guardian’s 190-year history.[20]
What stopped in February 2014 was the publication of documents, not the reporting. For example on January 2015 the Guardian reported from the Snowden documents that GCHQ had captured the emails of journalists at major international outlets. And on June 2015 it published a joint investigation with The New York Times into GCHQ’s role in American drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, drawn from the documents provided by Snowden to the Guardian “and shared with The New York Times.”
So even sixteen months after its last document publication, the Guardian was still analyzing the archive and sharing documents with its American partner, but it chose not to release any documents (nor did The New York Times).
In May in 2014, the DPBAC committee’s chair reported that engagement with the Guardian had continued to strengthen and that the process “had culminated by the appointment of Paul Johnson (Guardian deputy editor) as a DPBAC member.”
Jacob Appelbaum – who worked on the archive, published extensive reporting in Der Spiegel and elsewhere, and helped Poitras vet Snowden — sharply criticized the Guardian in March 2016:
In his 2018 book Breaking News, Rusbridger covers the Snowden era in extensive detail, discussing the Heywood meetings, the destruction of the hard drives at the Guardian’s London office, Miranda’s detention at Heathrow, critical editorials from rival newspapers, and politicians demanding prosecutions. However, the reporting ends in a single clause: “Once the Snowden coverage had died down.”[21] This stands out as the only major event in the chapter lacking a clear actor or motivation. While all the other actions have clear motives, media coverage just fades away, with no explanation who decided to stop, when the choice was made, or why.
When asked in 2023 about the lack of document publication, MacAskill blamed waning interest, noting that “each story attracted smaller and smaller readerships, as interest dwindled.”
That is hard to square with what the Guardian’s own editor says about the same period. The paper published its last Snowden document accompynied with a story which was significant front-page news, as the most Snowden stories before it had been. Two months later it won a Pulitzer for the reporting. Eight months after the last document, Rusbridger records, the paper overtook The New York Times to become the leading serious English-language newspaper website in the world, having been the ninth-biggest paper in Britain.[22] He attributes the rise to doing “the stuff that journalism was — at least in our reckoning — supposed to do”: a list of subjects he expected nobody to read, in which security and civil liberties come second and third. “No one — surely — would read you if you banged on about climate change, security, civil liberties […] But they did.” He concluded that “there was clearly a huge, and global, appetite for significant news presented seriously. There was a need for it.”[22]
Nor had the appetite gone elsewhere. Der Spiegel went on publishing documents into 2015, with stories that made international headlines. The Intercept continued until 2019, across almost a hundred pieces. Whatever caused the Guardian to stop publishing documents in February 2014, it was not that there was nothing left or that nobody was reading.
According to Rusbridger[10] and MacAskill, Snowden had asked from the start that the reporting stay on surveillance and privacy rather than the wartime use of intelligence, and that Rusbridger had issued that internally as an edict. MacAskill describes being asked by Rusbridger, at some point after the London copy was destroyed, to go back to The New York Times — “which still had the material” — and review it for stories that might become reportable if that restriction was lifted. He returned to London with a list