As we come closer and closer to Edward Snowden’s interview tonight with none other than Brian Williams of NBC, Glenn Greenwald has said (while promoting his new book) that he will be publishing a list of Americans (likely high profile individuals) that are being spied upon by the NSA. This list of NSA targets that are American citizens (something the NSA cannot really do without specific permission) will likely open up exactly who the NSA is spying on in terms of people inside the US. We will discover what kinds of groups they’re targeting and where those people come from as well, and it will likely make the NSA look a lot worse than they already do with the American public. After all, the people of Aghanistan and The Bahamas probably aren’t very happy with the NSA either once they found out that all of their calls were being recorded by the NSA.

Additionally, I have a very strong feeling that many of the Americans that the NSA is spying on are probably the very people that are cooperating with them, including the employees of 80-some companies that are cooperating with them, according to a recent Wikileaks disclosure. Greenwald also said that the NSA’s data security isn’t necessarily the greatest when you consider that Edward Snowden had successfully stolen 1.7 million files from their systems and was not caught  during his entire process. This alone should be a grave worry of anyone that believes that the NSA should be allowed to capture and then warehouse billions of records across the world, including those of American citizens. Ultimately, the NSA should not be trusted to the degree that they are today and that there should be more oversight of the agency, more than the recently passed USA Freedom Act which was gutted the day before it was passed in order to give the US security apparatus more freedoms than were originally intended in the bill.

Glenn Greenwald hasn’t given a specific date or time when he will release these names, but there’s a good chance he’ll do it after Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams airs on NBC tonight. This will be the first interview that Edward Snowden has with any American network since his disclosures of NSA spying last year and will be aired at 10pm/9pm central on NBC. While we don’t know the details of that interview, we can assume that it’ll probably rehash a lot of things that have already been disclosed and won’t likely talk much about any new disclosures since Snowden has left many of those to be released by journalists. Although don’t forget, Brian Williams is a journalist and there’s a good chance we could hear something new during that interview, we simply don’t know what Snowden wants to say about the NSA directly to the American public.

Either way, this week sounds like it should pan out to be pretty interesting if both Snowden and Greenwald release new info.

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According to the latest release by Wikileaks, the NSA is recording all calls coming in and out of Afghanistan. They reported this even though other publications and journalists strictly opposed to releasing the name of Afghanistan in their disclosures that the NSA was recording all calls in the Bahamas. Under a week ago, The Intercept (Glenn Greenwald and co.) along with Wikileaks and a few other publications had disclosed that all cellular calls were being recorded by the NSA and that there was another country that had yet to be named that was getting a similar treatment. However, The Intercept refused to publish the name of the second country for fear that it would cause actual and gave harm to people’s lives if that country’s name were to be released.

However, Wikileaks did not agree with The Intercept and The Washington Post on the Afghanistan topic and chastised them publicly on Twitter for not wanting to disclose the name of the second target country, even though Wikileaks did not believe that the truth should be withheld or that knowing the truth would actually affect anyone’s lives or put anyone in danger. The Washington Post and The Intercept both chose to withhold the name of the second country but really, it seems quite pointless to have done so if Wikileaks was already going to release that information. Additionally, I don’t quite understand how The Intercept and The Washington Post necessarily rationalized that releasing Afghanistan’s name would somehow endanger lives. If anything, it would merely result in the US being pushed out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, which is already an inevitability as it is already.

Not to mention, the Afghani people have the full right to know that the US is effectively spying on all of their cellular communications without their consent. They are already living with a heavy US military presence but in addition to that, everything they’re doing is effectively being monitored by the NSA and likely passed on to the military and CIA who are partaking in drone strikes. Overall, this information is certainly not surprising, but it is still quite worrying that the NSA is capable of spying on an entire country’s cellular communications and record every bit of it as well. Also don’t forget that the NSA is also collecting metadata on people in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines as well. None of this is surprising, but the sad part is that the NSA is allowed to continue to violate people’s electronic privacy in the name of ‘national security’.

It will be interesting, however, to see how the US’ dipolmatic relations and military engagements with the aforementioned countries will be as a result of this disclosure. No, I don’t think people’s lives are in danger, just the political climate is a bit more difficult than it was a few days ago.

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Since we’ve had quite a bit of time between Snowden disclosures of NSA activities, it appears as though Wikileaks has gotten ahold of some secret NSA documents that name names as to whom has been cooperating with them. They claim that they have over 80 different companies in their strategic partnerships.

Wikileaks Tech NSA

The Wikileaks obtained slide states that these 80 “Major Global Corporations” are supporting BOTH missions. However, the document doesn’t specify exactly what both of those missions are, exactly. However, since this slide is labelled as COMINT that means it specifically pertains to communications between people, which may narrow exactly what those missions might be.

They list that those 80 companies are in a long laundry list of businesses including:

Telecommunications and Network Service Providers – AT&T, Verizon and Qwest (now part of Centurylink).

Network Infrastructure – Cisco and HP

Hardware Platforms Desktops/Servers – HP, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, EDS (now HP)

Operating Systems – Microsoft

Applications Software – Oracle, EDS (now HP) and Microsoft

Security Hardware and Software – Cisco, Oracle, EDS (now HP)

System Integrators – HP, IBM, Cisco and EDS (now HP)

However, if you do look at this list, it only specifically names 12 of the 80 companies that they’re cooperating with. This is the first time that companies are specifically being named as cooperative partners in NSA activities. Back when the NSA’s PRISM activities were disclosed most of the companies were able to feign their being victims of the NSA activities as completely unknowing as to the PRISM program. However, there have been numerous suspicions that many of these companies had been cooperating with the NSA on certain backdoors and such in order to obtain government contracts and such. Additionally, some executives even claimed that they were attacked by the government because they wouldn’t cooperate, namely Qwest’s former CEO Joseph Nacchio.

While Wikileaks has been known to leak documents that the US government doesn’t particularly like being seen by the public, this is a rare disclosure by Wikileaks that doesn’t come with much more information. While we would like to know the full list of companies involved and the rest of the slides in this deck, we’ll have to go off of what we have now. However, we will be contacting our people at the companies mentioned above to see what they have to say about their involvement with NSA security programs. On the record.

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