WikiLeaks Threatens To Reveal Information That Glenn Greenwald Says Could Lead To 'Deaths'

Michael Kelley

May 20, 2014, 05:53 IST

screenshot/YouTube
The Twitter account @WikiLeaks is widely considered to be run by founder Julian Assange.
"We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours." - WikiLeaks on Twitter

On Monday The Intercept reported, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that the NSA is able "to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation" in the Bahamas and an unnamed country.

Editor Glenn Greenwald said The Intercept didn't reveal the country because they were "very convinced" that doing so would lead to "deaths."

After a heated discussion between WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Intercept Editor-In-Chief John Cook, and American WikiLeaks hacker-turned-Der Spiegal contributor Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks tweeted that it will reveal the name of the second being spied on by the NSA.

@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.
- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014

That implies that WikiLeaks knows the other country - which would only be possible if the rogue publishing organization has access to the Snowden documents. There is no overt indication that it does.

The only plausible way for this to be possible is if Appelbaum, who led the reporting on several Der Spiegel articles based on NSA documents (which may or may not be from Snowden), shared information with his friend Julian Assange after agreeing that the redaction by The Intercept is "a mistake."

Appelbaum, a friend of Laura Poitras, the other journalist who Snowden gave a large set of documents, also gave a presentation detailing a classified document listing technology available to TAO.

These coincidences do not imply that Appelbaum knows the unnamed country, or that he offered this information to Assange. But they are significant if they lend credibility of WikiLeaks' threat.

The threat's potential for harm is real: Snowden's closest source and the U.S. government believe that revealing the unnamed country "could lead to increased violence."

Scary stuff. Journalist Jeremy Duns, who assumes that Assange is behind the WikiLeaks tweets, summed it up like this:

@20committee If his 72-hour SPECTRE-to-UN-style tweet is true, he a) May cause deaths b) Now has access to Snowden material. What a maniac.
- Jeremy Duns (@jeremyduns) May 19, 2014