Reporters say complex files of NSA slow to yield secrets

Another day, another news flash about the National Security Agency’s global surveillance program.

Over the past 10 days, the online publication The Intercept has published reports on the agency’s ability to infect computers with malware and to hack into computers of system administrators to gain access to their networks. On Tuesday, it was a Washington Post article about an agency program known as MYSTIC that can collect and record every phone call in an unidentified country for up to 30 days.

The string of articles dates back to early June, when Britain’s Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post began breaking story after story based on documents leaked weeks earlier by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former government contractor.

Why, given that Snowden’s leak occurred about 10 months ago, are revelations still emerging?

The short answer, according to the journalists behind the articles, is that the documents don’t give up the agency’s secrets clearly or cleanly. Their technical, and often cryptic, references to agency programs require painstaking reporting and consultations with national-security and technical experts to unravel.

“It takes a long time to go through tens of thousands of complex surveillance documents,” said Glenn Greenwald, who has written dozens of stories about the National Security Agency since last year, mostly for The Guardian and lately for The Intercept, a startup backed by Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media. “It takes an even longer time to process and understand them sufficiently to report them accurately and to make informed decisions about what should be disclosed in accordance with our agreement with our source.”

Martin Baron, The Washington Post’s executive editor, said the Snowden documents are filled with “hints and clues and fragments. These are pieces of a puzzle that you have to put together,” a time-consuming process.

The documents use cover names, abbreviations and operational concepts familiar to government security officials - their intended readers - but not to the average reader or journalist, said Barton Gellman, The Washington Post’s principal reporter on the story.

“A bunch of them require a foundation in computer science or network technologies,” Gellman said. “The documents we’ve published required a lot of annotation for general readers, and we chose them because they were among the clearest.”

With the articles, the reporting process doesn’t just involve the usual steps of verifying the authenticity and accuracy of the information. The reporters also have discussions with their publication’s lawyers and consult government officials about security concerns.

Greenwald and Gellman say there are more articles to come.

“I believe many of the most recent articles have been among the most important,” said Greenwald, “and I truly believe that the most significant stories are ones that we are still working on reporting.”