ACace5·Sep 1, 2024
https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive
second result on ddg for "Snowden files", wasn't hard to find...
In City of Columbus sues expert who exposed extent of cyberattackiamcryptoki
snowden-archive
Security & Privacy2020–2024
iamcryptoki / snowden-archive
snowden-archive
💥 A collection of all documents leaked by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
💥 A collection of all documents leaked by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-11-15 00:29:17 UTC to 2024-09-01 23:01:48 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesSlide 5 (Serendipity - New protocols) in this presentation:
https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive/blob/master/d...
It's heavily redacted but the parts that are visible show they were targeting BigTable replication traffic (BTI_TabletServer RPCs) for "kansas-gaia" (Gaia is their account system), specifically the gaia_permission_whitelist table which was one of the tables used for the login risk analysis. You can see the string "last_logins" in the dump.
Note that the NSA didn't fully understand what they were looking at. They thought it was some sort of authentication or authorization RPC, but it wasn't.
In order to detect suspicious logins, e.g. from a new country or from an IP that's unlikely to be logging in to accounts, the datacenters processing logins needed to have a history of recent logins for every account. Before around
Read the rest
2011 they didn't have this - such data existed but only in logs processing clusters. To do real time analytics required the data to be replicated with low latency between clusters. The NSA were delighted by this because real-time IP address info tied to account names is exactly what they wanted. They didn't have it previously because a login was processed within a cluster, and user-to-cluster traffic was protected by SSL. After the authentication was done inter-cluster traffic related to a user was done using opaque IDs and tokens. I know all about this because I initiated and ran the anti-hijacking project there in about 2010.
The pie chart on slide 6 shows how valuable this traffic was to them. "Google Authorization, Security Question" and "gaia // permission_whitelist" (which are references to the same system) are their top target by far, followed by "no content" (presumably that means failed captures or something). The rest is some junk like indexing traffic that wouldn't have been useful to them.
Fortunately the BT replication traffic was easy to encrypt, as all the infrastructure was there already. It just needed a massive devops and capacity planning effort to get it turned on for everything.
Why was it removed when the Snowden archive of classified documents is stil up?
https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive
In I-S00N: Leaked Documents Reveal China's Global Surveillance ProgramErm, there is this: https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive/
In Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be publishedSnowden Archive – documents leaked by Snowden
197 points · Open discussion> had its dark fibre connections between data centres tapped by the NSA. Is that the "participation" that was referred to by the Snowden documents?
No, that's a separate thing. They do both. See the "you should use both" slide.
https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive/blob/master/d...
As to the apple claims that they didn't participate in PRISM, I think they were just lying. Clapper lied to congress as well, so this isn't unheard of. They would likely have breached their government contract by telling the truth. That being said, them having never heard about the program name might be true because it might not have been known to them under that name, but that's just a detail.
In Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look