How many documents did Edward Snowden take -- and how could he have read them all?

But this ever-growing number (seemingly proportional to the growing number of outlets with access) also speaks to a crucial element in the mythology Snowden, with help from Greenwald and Poitras, have tried to build around his disclosures. In the early days of his self-identification as the leaker, Snowden went out of his way to say that he carefully vetted each document he was releasing to make sure it was relevant and in the public interest:

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

The problem with this statement is two-fold:

-The documents clearly contain damaging information that could hurt people. When some of Snowden’s documents wound up in Der Spiegel, they declined to publish some of them. Their reasoning? “SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words.” Snowden has also explicitly graymailed the government by threatening to release everything onto the internet if he feels sufficiently threatened — damage be damned.