At the beginning of the week, reports from The Intercept revealed that the National Security Agency has been recording nearly every phone call made in the Bahamas and “another country”. Today, WikiLeaks released a statement saying that the other country is, in fact, Afghanistan.
In its original report, The Intercept didn’t reveal Afghanistan was part of the phone intercept program, citing “specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.” In its statement, WikiLeaks comes out strongly against that line of reasoning:
We do not believe it is the place of media to “aid and abet” a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population.
Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan.
The WikiLeaks report doesn’t go into detail as to how the data is being collected, although the NSA’s phone-monitoring capabilities are by now somewhat well known. [WikiLeaks via The Verge]