Why Did Wikileaks Name "Country X" When Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t?

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Earlier this week, the Intercept revealed another bombshell from Edward Snowden's cache of government secrets: The NSA soaks up all the mobile phone calls from the Bahamas and another country. When they didn't name that country, Wikileaks did. The question now is: why the secrecy?

The initial report from Intercept reporters Ryan Deveraux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras offered details about a U.S. electronic spying program known as SOMALGET, which is capable of capturing and "storing an entire nation's phone traffic for 30 days." The program was currently being used on two nations, and the Intercept was up front about one of thosethe Bahamaswhere calls, including those of Americans, were being captured en masse without the nation's knowledge.

That surveillance was part of MYSTIC, a larger, previously reported-on program that yanks metadata from calls in the Bahamas and four other countries. But Greenwald and his coauthors, whose work is not exactly known for its government-friendly restraint, noted that the NSA used its all-calls recording capability on another country along with the Bahamasbut declined to identify that nation:

Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country.

Wikileaks took umbrage at that omission and early this morning identified the so-called "Country X" in a post and a tweet:

Wikileaks' argument, essentially, was that the U.S. could use its phone-record data to deliver drone strikes against Afghans, and the people of Afghanistan deserved to know that:

Both the Washington Post and The Intercept stated that they had censored the name of the victim country at the request of the US government. Such censorship strips a nation of its right to self-determination on a matter which affects its whole population. An ongoing crime of mass espionage is being committed against the victim state and its population. 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.

This raises a host of questions, both about the Intercept's choice to omit the Afghanistan identification and Wikileaks' choice to expose it.

Is it really surprising that the U.S. uses its tapping capabilities to soak up phone communications in Afghanistan, a country where American troops are fighting a war? Despite overwhelming public opinion against the warand public criticism of NSA spyingthat sort of intelligence-gathering might actually be reassuring to many Americans, particularly those with loved ones working there.

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Why Did Wikileaks Name "Country X" When Glenn Greenwald Wouldn't?