Assange Attacks Glenn Greenwald as a Gatekeeper: Accuses Greenwald of Removing Key Facts from Story Based On Snowden Document — Greenwald Claims He Was 'Saving Lives'

Julian Assange (left) and Glenn Greenwald. (Photos screen captured from YouTube video)

Assange threatens to release the information that Greenwald is hiding: The name of the country that the U.S. is conducting mass surveillance on.

By Dan Murphy
The presumed tension between anti-secrecy activist Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, the arch-disseminator of NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, erupted into the open yesterday on Twitter. The two sparred publicly over Greenwald's decision to redact a piece of information from a recent story.

RELATED STUDY: What is Glenn Greenwald Covering Up?

The story released yesterday and written by Greenwald and two colleagues, alleges that the US is "secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas." The story, published on First Look Media's Intercept channel, also says that the US is harvesting cellphone metadata from four other countries and names three of them - Mexico, The Philippines and Kenya.

The fifth country? The article says "The Intercept is not naming (it) in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence."

Assange is generally assumed to write the Wikileaks Twitter feed (and has been watched doing so.) And he wasn't happy at Greenwald's decision to withhold information.

It is not the place of Firstlook or WaPo to decide how a people will chose to act against mass breaches of their rights by the United States
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014

If a nation wants to engage in a revolt on the basis that the US government is recording all their phone calls, that is their right.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014

Greenwald then sought to persuade Assange that some redaction to save lives is reasonable. He wrote, among other things:

@wikileaks But there was a very convincing probability in that 5th country for how innocent people would die which we all accepted.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 19, 2014

But Assange was unmoved and after some more back and forth, Assange's twitter account dropped this bombshell:

@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014

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