According to Jacob Appelbaum, The Intercept - the media outlet co-founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to publish the Snowden files - is no longer in possession of the documents. “I was informed that they destroyed their copy of the archive”, Appelbaum tells us.
I thought this was an interesting tidbit. It’s been a minute since I heard anything about Appelbaum. A while back he had some metoo type allegations, but I never really paid attention to what became of that or him afterward.
This is the most recent news that pops up about that controversy.
I don’t disagree with Appelbaum, however, that it’s a little bit unconscionable that those files were destroyed. There’s a lot of valid criticism in the way Wikileaks does things, with a large data-dump, but it never really felt like we actually got the full picture of what was happening with the Snowden files, with so much of it never actually being published or written about.
I do wonder if Laura Poitras still has a copy, but as a filmmaker who works less in information security, it seems more doubtful.