WikiLeaks Reveals Afghanistan is Second Country Having All Phone Calls Monitored by NSA

Wikileaks has followed through on its promise to reveal the second country where the US government is monitoring all phones, revealing that all phone calls in Afghanistan are being monitored by the NSA's hugely powerful Somalget tool.

Earlier this week Glenn Greenwald revealed that the NSA had been monitoring all the domestic and international phone calls of the Bahamas' but redacted the identity of a second country as he believed it could lead to the death of innocent people.

Three days ago Wikileaks promised to publish the name of the country and in a statement on Friday morning its editor-in-chief Julian Assange said:

"WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan."

Addressing the concerns of both the Washington Post and the Intercept about the identification of Afghanistan as county X, Assagne said:

"The Intercept stated that the US government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a 'rise in violence'. Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq."

Assange continued: "The Intercept stated that the US government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a 'rise in violence'. Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq."

The tool the NSA is using to do this is called Somalget, which Greenwald said could "vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation."

The Somalget programme records actual conversations before storing them for up to 30 days, when the agency wipes them from their records.

Unlike other programs which simply collect the metadata of phone calls - source, destination and time but not content of conversations - Somalget allows NSA agents to effectively go back in time to listen to conversations.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden to Greenwald said:

"[W]e buffer certain calls that MAY be of foreign intelligence value for a sufficient period to permit a well-informed decision on whether to retrieve and return specific audio content."

The documents also claim that the use of the Somalget program in the Bahamas and Afghanistan "has led to the discovery of international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers.

Details of the NSA's actions in Afghanistan had already been revealed in previous leaks. In a book written by German newspaper Der Spiegel about the Snowden leaks it reported that using a program called Acid Wash, the NSA was collecting between 30 and 40 million telephony metadata records per day in the country.