Snowden refers here to WikiLeaks's overriding philosophy that information they receive should be made public: Once the organization has obtained sensitive documents, it does not believe in "redacting" sensitive parts of those documents.
Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of the Intercept who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Snowden's document dump, criticized WikiLeaks for that reason in an interview published Thursday with Slate's Isaac Chotiner. Snowden, who has long maintained that the intelligence he made public was in the public interest (and that not all agency leaks or hacks are newsworthy enough to be made public), retweeted Slate's link to the Greenwald interview, which read, in part:
We have been attacked—we being the journalists who have kind of shepherded the Snowden archive reporting—by a lot of people, including WikiLeaks, in fact led by WikiLeaks, for not dumping all the information but instead redacting information that we thought might harm innocent people [...] We’ve done a lot of withholding information in order to protect people’s privacy or reputational interests or other legitimate interests. We tried to balance these two competing values. WikiLeaks has said, criticizing us, that they no longer believe in any form of redaction. I do not ascribe to that view.
WikiLeaks—whose Sarah Harrison helped Snowden flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after the U.S. charged Snowden under the Espionage Act in 2013—fired back to Snowden on Twitter. (The day before, Snowden expressed disdain for each party's presidential nominee.)
The organization published nearly 20,000 emailed before the start of the Democratic National Convention that highlighted the Democratic party's favoritism of now-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton; it also prompted DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign following the convention.
On Sunday morning's Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd grilled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the source of the WikiLeaks DNC email dump—since most recent reports have indicated the hack was, in fact, perpetrated by Russian hackers—but Assange refused to acknowledge the source of the leak:
And an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper Friday night, Assange promised there was more to come.
"We have more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign," Assange said. "That is correct to say that."
Snowden has not responded to WikiLeaks's charge.
