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WikiLeaks threatens to name NSA-targeted country despitewarnings it may lead to deaths — RT USA

WikiLeaks threatens to name NSA-targeted country despite warnings itmay lead to deathsPublished time: May 20, 2014 18:38

AFP Photo / Fabrice Cof f rini

Despite warnings that doing so “could lead to increased violence” and potentially deaths, anti-secrecygroup WikiLeaks says it plans to publish the name of a country targeted by a massive United Statessurveillance operation.

On Monday this week, journalists at The Intercept published a report based of f of leaked US NationalSecurity Agency documents supplied by f ormer contractor Edward Snowden which suggested that the NSAhas been collecting in bulk the contents of all phone conversations made or received in two countriesabroad.

Only one of those nations, however — the Bahamas — was named by The Intercept. The other, journalistsRyan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras wrote this week, was withheld as a result of “credibleconcerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.”

WikiLeaks has since accused The Intercept and its parent company First Look Media of censorship andsays they will publish the identity of the country if the name remains redacted in the original article. TheIntercept’s Greenwald f ired back over Twitter, though, and said his outlet chose to publish more detailsthan the Washington Post, where journalists previously reported on a related call collection program butchose to redact more thoroughly.

“We condemn Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entirenation,” 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 arebeing 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 def ended his decision to publish the names of f our countries where telephony metadatais collected by the NSA but withhold a f if th where content is recorded as well, WikiLeaks said it could beinterpreted as meaning that the unknown country doesn’t deserve to know they’re being surveilled, butGreenwald said The Intercept was "very convinced" it could lead to deaths. Later, WikiLeaks equated this asan act of racism.

Glenn Greenwald.(Reuters / Ueslei Marcelino)

But as the conversation escalated, the WikiLeaks Twitter announced it would disclose the nation’s identif yif The Intercept did not, despite requests f rom the US government to leave that inf ormation redact overf ears of what the response could be.

“When has true published information harmed innocents?” WikiLeaks asked. “To repeat this false Pentagontalking 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, thatthe identity of the country could be revealed bef ore the weekend.

As RT reported earlier this week, The Intercept story made claims that the NSA has used a programcodenamed MYSTIC to collect basic phone records in at least f ive countries, similar to the metadata thathas been controversially collected in bulk domestically as revealed in one of the f irst documents released

by Snowden last year. In the Bahamas and one more locale, though, The Intercept reported that NSAdocuments reveal another program, codenamed SOMALGET, is deployed in order to process “over 100million call events per day.”

SOMALGET, the document reads, is a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on targetnetworks, 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 unilaterallyand without the knowledge of the island’s government or its quarter-of -a-million people.

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