The NSA has been recording nearly every phone call made in Afghanistan, according to WikiLeaks. The recordings are being made as part of the same program that was reported earlier this week to be capturing nearly every call in the Bahamas, as well as phone records from Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines. That report, made by The Intercept, declined to disclose the name of a second country where recordings of nearly all domestic and international phone calls were being captured as of 2013.
When The Intercept revealed mass NSA “full-take” call recording in the Bahamas and other nations, it declined to name another, sensitive country, citing US concerns about violence. Now Wikileaks has claimed that the nation in question is Afghanistan and said the NSA is bluffing about any possible danger to folks there. In the Wikileaks blog, Julian Assange said that the US has made such statements before and it has never seen any evidence of increased violence following leaks. On the other hand, it’s easy to see why the US government wouldn’t want such information public, given its war against terrorists in Afghanistan. But Assange countered that the press has no obligation to protect a country like the US if it engages in “ongoing crimes” against an entire nation. He added that’s especially true when such calls are sometimes used to target drone strikes, which often kill innocent civilians. The US government has yet to comment on the matter.
