The @WikiLeaks Twitter handle is widely considered to be run by its founder, Julian Assange. REUTERS/Anthony Devlin "We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours." – WikiLeaks on Twitter

America's National Security Agency (NSA) can "vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation" in the Bahamas and an unnamed country, the new publication The Intercept reported Monday, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald — who wrote about documents leaked by Snowden when he was a columnist at The Guardian — said the publication didn't reveal the country because it was "very convinced" that doing so would lead to "deaths."

This graphic shows the countries targeted in the program detailed by The Intercept. The Intercept

After a heated discussion among WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Intercept editor in chief John Cook, and American WikiLeaks hacker turned Der Spiegal contributor Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks tweeted that it would reveal the name of the second country being spied on by the NSA.

@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

That threat implies that WikiLeaks knows the other country — which would be possible only if the rogue publishing organization deduced it from the redaction or has access to the Snowden documents.



The most plausible way for WikiLeaks to have access to a Snowden cache is if Appelbaum, who led the reporting on several Der Spiegel articles based on NSA documents (which may or may not be from Snowden), shared information with his friend and WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange. Applebaum tweeted that The Intercept's redaction was "a mistake."

Appelbaum, a close friend of Laura Poitras, the other journalist whom Snowden gave a large set of documents, also gave a presentation detailing a classified document listing technology available to the NSA's hacking unit, known as TAO. It is not known how he acquired those documents.

These coincidences do not imply that Appelbaum knows the unnamed country or that he offered this information to Assange — there may be other ways WikiLeaks may be able to obtain Snowden documents — but the close association between Appelbaum and the key players involved are significant if they lend credibility to WikiLeaks' threat.

The threat's potential for harm is real: Snowden's closest source and the U.S. government believe that revealing the unnamed country "could lead to increased violence."