Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
More importantly, there's money out the other end for them. The payoff is more questionable for information from Snowden leaks. Yes, I guess a journalistic outlet can get a big scoop and that drives eyeballs which leads to advertisers... But that's pretty different from the ambulance-chaser payout.
We're such a weird society when it comes to enforcing laws on business. It's all "scummy" behavior.
For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws.
It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior.
There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability.
Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example.
If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.
You'd be surprised. Top journalism organizations do this kind of thing with tremendous efficiency. The Pandora Papers were impressive for exactly that reason.
Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks.
