In the SIDtoday articles, "the agency’s spies explain a surprising amount about what they were doing, how they were doing it and why," The Intercept explains.
The latest batch of articles catalogue NSA’s challenges monitoring signals intelligence (SIGINT) from al-Qaeda’s primitive communications, and the role the NSA played in the early phases of the war in Iraq, including miscalculating the strength of the country’s insurgency.
The SIDtoday files also reveal NSA’s pride and frustration in netting millions of non-targets in its dragnet digital surveillance. In a November 2003 publication, the newsletter extolled the "SIGINT successes" of its FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW programs, which partnered with telecommunications giants AT&T and Verizon respectively.
In July, the NSA newsletter discussed the agency’s Digital Network Exploitation, capable of extracting intelligence from any device on the digital global network.
The newsletter notes the need to improve intelligence gathering as "our targets communications are increasingly buried by millions of non-target communications."
The Intercept has been the main platform for new Snowden leaks and plans to release nine years of SIDtoday articles. Snowden confidants Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the first to publish Snowden’s revelations in 2013, are co-founders of The Intercept.
