Julian Assange Goes Where Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t …

Though they're often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald dont always see eye to eye.

Their differences spilled into public view this week, when the WikiLeaks Twitter account took Greenwald and his site, The Intercept, to task for redacting the name of a country where the United States government is recording every phone call.

On Monday, Greenwald, Ryan Devereaux, and Laura Poitrasrevealed that American national-security operatives have been recording all calls in the Bahamas, and that the same program, MYSTIC, is scooping up metadata in Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines.

Thats a significant reveal, and it goes much further than The Washington Post did in March, when Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani wrote on the N.S.A.s capability to record full-take audio.

But Greenwalds The Intercept wasn't ready to reveal the name of a second nation where such capabilities were being applied, in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. That act of caution caught the attention of the WikiLeaks Twitter account, which went on a tear and accused Greenwald of painting future publications into a corner with this Pentagon line.

Though WikiLeaks tweets dont carry an individual signature, its widely believed that Assange controls the account.

Greenwald responded by pointing out that WikiLeaks had redacted information in the past, and noted that the government had strongly urged The Intercept to redact the names of all the countries involved. Though the debate continued for some time, it ended somewhat abruptly, when WikiLeaks tweeted, We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.

After a slight delay curiously blamed on media cycle reasons, WikiLeaks delivered: the site released a statement Friday morning that identified Afghanistan as the country redacted from The Intercepts reporting.

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, Assanges statement read. Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan.

The Intercept stated that the U.S. government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a rise in violence, Assange continued. Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

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Julian Assange Goes Where Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t ...