What's in Edward Snowden's 41-slide PowerPoint deck that's so hot that nobody dare publish it?
Now that Snowden has revealed himself to the world as the NSA whistleblower, details about his interaction with the press are surfacing. And at the center of the drama is a still mostly-unpublished 41-slide presentation, classified top secret, that Snowden gave to the Washington Post and the Guardian to expose the NSA's internet spying operation "PRISM".
Only five slides from the presentation have been published. The other 36 remain a mystery. Both the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Post's Barton Gellman have made it clear that the rest of the PowerPoint is dynamite stuff … which we're not going to be seeing any time soon. "If you saw all the slides you wouldn't publish them," wrote Gellman on Twitter, adding in a second tweet: "I know a few absolutists, but most people would want to defer judgment if they didn't know the full contents."
Even Greenwald, who urged me rather strongly in 2010 to publish Bradley Manning's personal chats, is taking a more conservative view of the NSA's PowerPoint. "I'm not going to discuss our legal advice with you," Greenwald wrote on Twitter, "but we're not publishing NSA tech methods."
Comments