Glenn Greenwald, one of the main journalists behind the exposé of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)’s global mass surveillance of Internet and telephone communications, said that the “biggest yet” revelations were yet to come in days ahead — the names of numerous U.S. persons and organisations who were the targets of the automated mega-snooping.
Specific targetsWriting for the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times Mr. Greenwald said, “One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”
The exposé on the NSA’s spying, which was based principally on the documents made available by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, sparked off a series of hearings in the U.S. Congress during which Senators grilled intelligence chiefs on whether they had flouted any laws in authorising surveillance and President Barack Obama subsequently promised greater transparency about dragnet surveillance.
Mr. Greenwald, who is currently promoting his new book, No Place to Hide , said that the list would be published on The Intercept, the website that he and his colleagues established after leaving The Guardian , where initial reports on NSA’s surveillance were published.
