Despite warnings that doing so “could lead to increased violence” and potentially deaths, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says it plans to publish the name of a country targeted by a massive United States surveillance operation.
On Monday this week, journalists at The Intercept published a
report based off of leaked US National
Security Agency documents supplied by former contractor Edward
Snowden which suggested that the NSA has been collecting in bulk
the contents of all phone conversations made or received in two
countries abroad.
Only one of those nations, however — the Bahamas — was named by
The Intercept. The other, journalists Ryan Devereaux, Glenn
Greenwald and Laura Poitras wrote this week, was withheld as a
result of “credible concerns that doing so could lead to
increased violence.”
WikiLeaks has since accused The Intercept and its parent company
First Look Media of censorship and says they will publish the
identity of the country if the name remains redacted in the
original article. The Intercept’s Greenwald fired back over
Twitter, though, and said his outlet chose to publish more
details than the Washington Post, where journalists previously
reported on a related call collection program but chose to redact
more thoroughly.
“We condemn Firstlook for following the Washington Post into
censoring the mass interception of an entire nation,”
WikiLeaks tweeted on Monday.
“It is not the place of Firstlook or the Washington Post to
deny the rights of an entire people to know they are being mass
recorded,” WikiLeaks added. “It is not the place of
Firstlook or WaPo to decide how a people will [choose] to act
against mass breaches of their rights by the United States.”
When Greenwald defended his decision to publish the names of four
countries where telephony metadata is collected by the NSA but
withhold a fifth where content is recorded as well, WikiLeaks
said it could be interpreted as meaning that the unknown country
doesn’t deserve to know they’re being surveilled, but Greenwald
said The Intercept was "very convinced" it could lead to
deaths. Later, WikiLeaks equated this as an act of racism.
But as the conversation escalated, the WikiLeaks Twitter
announced it would disclose the nation’s identify if The
Intercept did not, despite requests from the US government to
leave that information redact over fears of what the response
could be.
“When has true published information harmed innocents?”
WikiLeaks asked. “To repeat this false Pentagon talking point
is to hurt all publishers.”
“We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population
is being mass recorded in 72 hours,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35
p.m. EST Tuesday evening. If the organization intends to uphold
that promise, that the identity of the country could be revealed
before the weekend.
As RT reported earlier this week, The Intercept story made
claims that the NSA has used a program codenamed MYSTIC to
collect basic phone records in at least five countries, similar
to the metadata that has been controversially collected in bulk
domestically as revealed in one of the first documents released
by Snowden last year. In the Bahamas and one more locale, though,
The Intercept reported that NSA documents reveal another program,
codenamed SOMALGET, is deployed in order to process “over 100
million call events per day.”
SOMALGET, the document reads, is a “program for embedded
collection systems overtly installed on target networks,
predominantly for the collection and processing of
wireless/mobile communications networks.” According to The
Intercept, the decision to wiretap all calls in and out of the
Bahamas was made unilaterally and without the knowledge of the
island’s government or its quarter-of-a-million people.