On Monday, 19 May 2014, Glenn Greenwald published his report entitled Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell call in the Bahamas, in which he reported about the NSA SOMALGET program, which is part of the larger MYSTIC program. MYSTIC has been used to intercept the communications of several countries, namely the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Phillipines, and thanks to Wikileaks we now know that the final country, redacted in Glenn Greenwalds original report on these programs, was Afghanistan.
SOMALGET can be used to take in the entire audio stream (not just metadata) of all the calls in an entire country, and store this information for (at least) 30 days. This is capability the NSA developed, and was published by The Washington Post in March this year.
Why the Censorship?
The question however, is why Glenn Greenwald chose to censor the name of Afghanistan out of his report. He claims it has been done to protect lives, but I honestly can’t for the life of me figure out why lives would be at risk when it is revealed to the Afghani’s that their country is one of the most heavily surveilled on the planet? This information is not exactly a secret. Why is this knowledge that’s OK for the Bahamians to possess, but not the Afghani’s? The US effectively colonized Afghanistan and it seems that everyone with at least half a brain can figure out that calling someone in Afghanistan might have a very high risk of being recorded and analysed by NSA. Now we know for certain that the probability of this happening is 1.
Whistleblowers risk their lives and livelihoods to bring to the public’s attention, information that they deem to be in the gravest public interest. Now, whistleblowers carefully consider which information to publish and/or hand out to journalists, and in the case of intelligence whistleblowers, they are clearly more expert than most journalists when it comes to security and sensing which information has to be kept from the public in the interest of safety of lives and which information can be published in the public interest. After all, they have been doing exactly that for most of their professional lives, in a security-related context.
Now, it seems that Greenwald acts as a sort of filter between the information Edward Snowden gave him for publication, and the actual information the public is getting. Greenwald is sitting on an absolute treasure-trove of information and is clearly cherry picking which information to publish and which information to withhold. By what criteria I wonder? Spreading out the publication of data however, is a good strategy, given that about a year has passed since the first disclosures, and it’s still very much in the media, which is clearly a very good thing. I don’t think that would have happened if all the information was dumped at once.
But on the other hand: Snowden has risked his life and left his comfortable life on Hawaii behind him to make this information public, a very brave thing to do, and certainly not a decision to take lightly, and has personally selected Greenwald to receive this information. And here is a journalist who is openly cherry-picking and censoring the information given to him, already preselected by Snowden, and thereby withholding potentially critical information from the public?
So I would hereby like to ask: By what criteria is Greenwald selecting information for publication? Why the need to interfere with the whistleblower’s judgement regarding the information, who is clearly more expert at assessing the security-related issues surrounding publication?
Annie Machon, whistleblower and former MI5, has also done an interview on RT about this Afghanistan-censoring business of Greenwald, whistleblowers deserve full coverage. Do watch. Whistleblowers risk their lives to keep the public informed of government and corporate wrongdoing. They need our support.
Update: Mensoh has also written a good article (titled: The Deception) about Greenwald’s actions, also in relation to SOMALGET and other releases. A highly recommended read.