Assange threatens to release Snowden info that Greenwald says could endanger lives

Julian Assange attacked Glenn Greenwald yesterday for a redaction in a recent story based on Snowden's NSA documents. Greenwald said it was done to save lives.

The presumed tension between anti-secrecy activist Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, the arch-disseminator of NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, erupted into the open yesterday on Twitter. The two sparred publicly over Greenwald's decision to redact a piece of information from a recent story.

Staff writer

Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.

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The story released yesterdayand written by Greenwald and two colleagues, alleges that the US is "secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas." The story, published on First Look Media's Intercept channel, also says that the US is harvesting cellphone metadata from four other countries and names three of them - Mexico, The Philippines and Kenya.

The fifth country? The article says "The Intercept is not naming (it) in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence."

Assange is generally assumed to write the Wikileaks Twitter feed (and has been watched doing so.) And he wasn't happy at Greenwald's decision to withhold information.

Greenwald then sought to persuade Assange that some redaction to save lives is reasonable. He wrote, among other things:

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Assange threatens to release Snowden info that Greenwald says could endanger lives