WikiLeaks names Afghanistan as second country where NSA records all mobile phone calls
Hours after saying it would delay announcement, group identifies 'Country X'
PUBLISHED : Friday, 23 May, 2014, 1:22pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 24 May, 2014, 12:22am
Staff Reporter
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Bloomberg
WikiLeaks has announced Afghanistan as the second country that has been targeted by the NSA’s mass-cellphone-data spying programme, defying warnings it would endanger lives.
Julian Assange said in a statement today on the whistle-blower site’s official page that the NSA “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic [and international] phone calls”.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the Edward Snowden story to the world and who works with The Intercept website, said the name of the country should not be revealed for fear it would “lead to deaths”.
The Washington Post has previously chosen not to disclose the name. In those reports, which revealed the Bahamas as one of "two or more" countries targeted by the NSA's powerful Somalget programme, the second was called "country x".
But Assange, who called the programme an "ongoing crime of mass espionage", opposed the alleged "censorship", which he said was made at the request of the US government.
“We do not believe it is the place of media to ‘aid and abet’ a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population,” Assange said.
"By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimisation, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere," he said.
Afghan voters film a presidential candidate's speech with their cellphones. Afghanistan is reportedly the target of the NSA's controversial Somalget programme. Photo: Reuters
The WikiLeaks founder, who has been under asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, said they could not disclose how WikiLeaks confirmed it was Afghanistan. WikiLeaks is not believed to have full access to Snowden’s leaked NSA documents.
But Assange said, "this can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programmes".
Greenwald had said on Twitter the decision not to reveal the name was made because "we were *very convinced this 1 would --> [lead to] deaths".
In response, WikiLeaks set a 72-hour deadline in which it pledged to reveal the country's identity.
Just hours before Assange's announcement today, WikiLeaks had tweeted that it would postpone the announcement due to "media cycle reasons", without elaborating.
Assange, who is editor-in-chief of the whistle-blowing site, voiced scepticism over the argument that the disclosure would have deadly repurcussions.
It cited its leak of often embarrassing US State Department cables from diplomats around the world in 2010, which the US said would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals".
Journalist Glenn Greenwald has explained that redacting the second country's name in reports was done to protect lives. Photo: AFP
"To this day we are not aware of any evidence provided by any government agency that any of our eight million publications have resulted in harm to life," Assange said.
Greenwald has not responded as yet.
In addition to the revelations about the Bahamas and the mystery country, The Intercept said the NSA was using a separate program, Mystic, to scoop up metadata - raw data that does not include actual conversations - from phone calls in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.
It is Somalget, however, that is sure to cause the biggest controversy, as actual conversations are stored for up to 30 days before the agency wipes them.
The Washington Post previously reported that although only a small fraction of calls are actually listened to by human analysts, millions of voice clips are still kept and sent to long-term storage.
Documents published on The Intercept website reveal the agency’s enthusiasm for Somalget, saying that it can “buffer full-take audio collection” as a means to “make possible remarkable new ways of performing both target development and target discovery”.
The use of Somalget in the Bahamas and the mystery country whose name is redacted, the document's authors claim, “has led to the discovery of international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers”.
