The next NSA scandal: A list revealing which U.S. citizens were spied on illegally

Security journalist Glenn Greenwald plans to release the names of U.S. citizens targeted by National Security Agency surveillance.

The WikiLeaks-esque report will answer “one of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying,” says Greenwald.

‘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.

Given the NSA’s history of spying for economic gains, it is possible that the NSA’s targets are not a risk to national security at all. In the event that the targets pose no risk, as Greenwald hints, this new story may lead to outrage at the scale of the original Snowden reports.

The story will appear on eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept. (Greenwald hasn’t yet disclosed the publication date.)

As we’ve previously reported, “Snowden’s leaks revealed the NSA’s efforts to turn Facebook into a surveillance machine, the agency’s close ties with Google, and the theft of private user data from firms like Yahoo and Apple.”