Edward Snowden first shed light on the National Security Agency's surveillance program in June 2013.
This time, more of the document trove leaked by the whistleblower nearly three years ago has been released by the Intercept.
The online news site, founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Swahili in 2014, posted the first batch of internal newsletters from the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) division. The SIDToday newsletters span more than a decade starting after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, according to the Next Web.
The first batch contains 166 documents from 2003 and is available to the public by downloading them from the Intercept's website and from a GitHub repository.
The nine years' worth of newsletters reveal the NSA's inner workings.
There is a vast amount of information to look over, ranging "from serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts' trips and vacations, with much in between. Many are self-serving and boastful, designed to justify budgets or impress supervisors. Others contain obvious errors or mindless parroting of public source material. However, some SIDtoday articles have been the basis of significant revelations from the archive."
For example, an article dated May 2003 describes how the secretive agency spent "many months" trying to tap the phone of a Russian crime boss, according to the Associated Press. The State Department wanted to find out more about the head of the Tambov crime network — known only as "Mr. Kumarin" — and whether the organization worked with Vladimir Putin. Kumarin was later convicted of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The latest leaks also have an NSA liaison officer discussing details about the agency's involvement at Guantanamo Bay, and its part in invading Iraq.
The Intercept has also shared the documents with journalists from other publications.
"We encourage other journalists, researchers, and interested parties to comb through these documents, along with future published batches, to find additional material of interest. Others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not," Greenwald, a former reporter for the Guardian.
