CBS

The National Security Agency and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters targeted WikiLeaks and Pirate Bay -- and ultimately users of those sites as well, according to leaked files.

Examining a series of classified documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, news site The Intercept reported on Tuesday that the NSA wanted to deem WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor." Such a designation would have subjected the site to extensive surveillance without the use of "defeats," an NSA action that aims to prevent US citizens from getting snared in the surveillance.

The UK's GCHQ went a step further by collecting the IP addresses of visitors to WikiLeaks along with the search terms they used to get to the site, according to a 2012 PowerPoint presentation. The presentation didn't reveal how extensive this monitoring was or if it's still active. But The Intercept referred to a surveillance tool X-Keyscore. Used by both the NSA and called GCHQ, X-Keyscore allows "an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any Web site the analyst specifies."

The information documented in the leaked files also shows Pirate Bay and its users on the NSA's potential hit list. The agency considered using its surveillance to target the popular file-sharing site as a "malicious" foreign server, "even if there is a possibility that U.S. persons could be using it as well," The Intercept said.

Finally, one NSA exchange seemed to minimize the impact of snagging a US citizen in surveillance. A comment by the NSA's Office of General Counsel and the oversight and compliance office of its Threat Operations Center said that the discovery that an American has been selected for surveillance must be mentioned in a quarterly report, "but it's nothing to worry about."

In response to the leaked documents, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange released the following statement: