We asked McAskill why The New York Times hasn’t published them in a decade. “This is a complicated issue,” he said. “Although the files are in the New York Times office, The Guardian retains responsibility for them. Should more journalists be given access to the Snowden documents? In that case, who should decide which journalists get to see them? Should the whole lot just be published for everyone to see? Snowden did not want the documents to be published en masse.
Why was only 1% of the Snowden archive published by the journalists who had full access to it?
How long would The New York Times be willing to store them? Where else could they be stored? Should the documents be destroyed?”
Feds hate data dumps platforms like WikiLeaks and DDoSecrets (doubt they can even publish anything significant rn). I won’t be surprised if U.S welcomes Snowden soon. If all of that was only 1% then what are the rest of leaks?
Edward Snowden hasn’t revealed the most insane and wicked secrets he has because he uses them as life insurance. If someone comes after him or his family, all of their most diabolical secrets will be revealed to the public. These secrets are what keeps him protected.
According to Barton Gellman’s book Dark Mirror , Snowden initially said that the idea of a cache of documents to be released in case he was killed was a “stupid revenge narrative” but after some pressure, he eventually said that he had “prepared an archive of additional documents in an encrypted container. He did not share the key with anyone. That container was filled with files that he had not had time to organize. They might be even more sensitive than the others.” Snowden devised a system in which the decryption key was split and shared among Gellman, Greenwald and Poitras, so that only all three could open the dead man archive. But Snowden got doubts and in the end he did not activate the mechanism and destroyed the key for the extra container.*
In the Motherboard interview, Snowden said that "what remains in the archive is stuff that requires much more substantial effort " which would be better for a book. He said that The Intercept wasn’t meant for that and that it was up to academic institutions, but they didn’t dare because they depend on grants from the federal government.
Other stuff that was not shared are more technical and operational you can have an idea of what some of them are here.
My understanding is that this was the explicit intent of Snowden, and was the reason he released the documents in the way that he did (through trusted journalists instead of a wholesale dump).
He chose to hand them off to journalists he considered trustworthy, and would be better positioned to bear the heavy responsibility of deciding what is and isn’t in the public interest and safe to disclose. It isn’t something he felt he had the right or authority to do unilaterally, and was very mindful that there are both costs/risks and benefits to leaking classified information.