Operating behind its “wall of secrecy,” the National Security Agency has been put on one watchdog’s list of ‘Enemies of the Internet.’

“Identifying government units or agencies rather than entire governments as Enemies of the Internet allows us to draw attention to the schizophrenic attitude towards online freedoms that prevails in in some countries. Three of the government bodies designated by Reporters Without Borders as Enemies of the Internet are located in democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms: the Centre for Development of Telematics in India, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States,” says the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.

For the first time, the group’s 2014 list of Internet Enemies includes a United States agency.

The group notes the efforts undertook by NSA contractor Edward Snowden in uncovering and exposing the massive scale of the surveillance state in the United States, and abroad.

“The mass surveillance methods employed in these three countries, many of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information. How will so-called democratic countries will able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?” says the group.

The US joins the UAE, Cuba, Iran, Bahrain, Belarus, Pakistan, Vietnam, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Uzbekistan, India, China, Ethiopia, and North Korea on the list. You can check out RWB’s entire report here.

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