How the West Bugs Middle East Revealed, But Who Leaked It?

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/08/23-1


The surveillance station in the Middle East intercepts and processes vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic. (Image: Reuters)


According to exclusive new reporting by the UK Independent, citing information contained in documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the British government maintains a secret monitoring station that allows Western intelligence agencies to tap into telecommunication systems across the Middle East.

Though the reporting did not reveal the exact location of the station, which sifts through electronic data extracted from "underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region," the British government claims the program is a centerpiece of the US and UK's so called "war on terror" as key agencies, including the CIA, NSA, and GCHQ, pour over the information provided.

If Snowden or Greenwald didn't leak the info, who did?

Strikingly, the Independent's reporting caused Glenn Greenwald, the journalist behind much of the reporting so far on the NSA documents, to question publicly how the newspaper received the information contained in its 'exclusive.' At the Guardian on Friday morning, Greenwald wrote:

This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided.

That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure?