The UpTake: There's a leak war afoot, and two of the most polarizing participants aren't holding back about who has gone too far, and who hasn't gone far enough.
Arift is forming in the world of leaked top-secret government documents. On one side is Glenn Greenwald, the founding editor of The Intercept online news site, who earlier this week reported that the U.S. government was recording practically every single cell phone call made to or from the Bahamas and another, unnamed country.
On the other side, is Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Wikileaks, who today published a report that the unnamed country was Afghanistan, a nation where the United States still has troops and is an already tenuous position.
“The Intercept stated that they had censored the name of the victim country at the request of the US government,” Assange wrote in thereport. “Such censorship strips a nation of its right to self-determination on a matter which affects its whole population.”
On May 19, the day Greenwald published the Bahamas report based on documents from the Edward Snowden archive, Wikileaks tweeted, “We condemn Firstlook [the parent company of The Intercept] for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation.” That initiated a lengthy exchange about when to censor and when to publish, culminating in a widely quoted tweet by Greenwald in which he said he was “very convinced” publishing the name would lead to “deaths.”
Today, Assange countered Greenwald’s argument, explaining that because the U.S. drone program targets and kills “thousands of people” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, “The censorship of a victim state’s identity directly assists the killing of innocent people.”
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