Glenn Greenwald recently released a stunning story with journalists Laura Poitras and Ryan Devereaux about the NSA's ability to suck up the content of every phone call made in the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya along with one mystery country that The Intercept is refusing to reveal.
The program that the NSA uses to vacuum up the phone calls of an entire nation is part of a larger NSA program called MYSTIC. The Washington Post reported on the MYSTIC program earlier this year, but decided to not name any of the nations that MYSTIC was monitoring en masse. The Intercept took it one step further, but still did not released the name of one last country in that list due to "credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence."
That one step, however, was evidently not far enough for WikiLeaks. In a heated Twitter back-and-forth between John Cook, The Intercept's editor-in-chief, Jacob Applebaum, once a WikiLeaks hacker, now a Snowden document holder, WikiLeaks itself, and Glenn Greenwald, the voice behind the Wikileaks account berated The Intercept team for redacting the name of the final country. Applebaum went as far as calling that redaction "a mistake."
Could the "Chinese military into economic espionage" brouhaha be a source of noise to detract from something more damaging for NSA?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 21 2014, @04:01PM
2-3 years ago I strolled into a headshop, never mind why, when somehow the conversation between the clerk and I started focusing on government work. She was a clean-cut student in a college area who had worked there just because it was a job, and she mentioned that her father was in the NSA and stationed in Afghanistan.
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.
It stands to reason that the invasion of Afghanistan would serve to place an NSA hub there, to avoid the repercussions of planting one in a more sensitive position like Saudi Arabia or Quatar.