Julian Assange has called on the Obama administration to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the National Security Agency and its British counterpart GCHQ targeted WikiLeaks and its users. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden claim the surveillance agencies considered using its powers against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay file-sharing website, as well as foreign branches of hacktivist groups, particularly Anonymous.
New documents leaked by former NSA employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA and GCHQ consistently spied on WikiLeaks in the past years, recording information regarding the people who accessed the site in the process, regardless of their citizenship. The Intercept has seen documents that reveal the extent of WikiLLeaks-related spying that targeted “the human network that supports WikiLeaks” including readers. For example, U.K.’s GCHQ was able to “secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site,” and “collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.