Has anyone noticed that most of the time, when the actual documentation is posted for Snowden-leak derived stories, that those docs all have a very similar style? They mostly look like bad power-point presentation slides, with goofy smiley faces in the diagrams, and very generalized, conversational language.

The other day, I was reading through that Guardian story on foreign SMS collection. That article had the same goofy slides we’ve seen going back to the PRISM stories, with the same smiley faces & conversational writing style. But what was different about this story is that it explicitly said where the slides came from:

theguardian.com

The documents seen by the Guardian were from an internal Wikipedia-style guide to the NSA program provided for GCHQ analysts, and noted the Dishfire program was “operational” at the time the site was accessed, in 2012.

This wiki has been mentioned in past stories, more generally, as something the British gov’t thinks Snowden essentially scraped a copy of:

independent.co.uk

Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Mr Snowden downloaded during 2012. Many of them came from an internal Wikipedia-style information site called GC-Wiki. Unlike the public Wikipedia, GCHQ’s wiki was generally classified Top Secret or above.

Just speculating, but perhaps many of the more salacious stories have been derived from copied pages of this British wiki and maybe these are their own second hand summaries and diagrams?