Wikileaks exposes secret which The Intercept wanted to hide
▻http://warincontext.org/2014/05/23/wikileaks-exposes-secret-which-the-intercept-wanted-to-hide
Earlier this week, The #Intercept reported:
Documents show that the #NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC #surveillance [a voice interception program] 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.
Note that the report while acknowledging that its redaction of “country X” came in response to “credible concerns,” it did not reveal who expressed those concerns.
If a similar report had appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times we would expect slightly more transparency — something along the lines that in response to concerns expressed by administration officials, the publication had agreed to withhold the name of this particular country. And we could also expect that this would be the kind of practice that #Glenn_Greenwald would characterize as an example of the mainstream media’s subservience to government. When The Intercept operates in a similar way, however, we’re supposed to see this as responsible behavior.
From his perch inside the Ecuador embassy in London, I imagine that Julian #Assange has a cynical view of the Greenwald/Omidyar operation. While Assange is paying the price for publishing secret documents, Greenwald is reaping handsome rewards. And as Assange pointed out today ►https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html, when claiming that “country X” is Afghanistan, the idea that sustaining the secrecy of the NSA’s mass surveillance program there might prevent increased violence, is highly debatable.