Brazil expresses concern at report of NSA spying
Jenny
Barchfield
PARATY, Brazil (AP) - Brazil's
foreign minister said Sunday his government is worried by a report that the
United States has collected data on billions of telephone and email
conversations in his country and promised an effort for international
protection of Internet privacy.
Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota,
speaking from the colonial city of Paraty where he was attending Brazil's top
literary festival, expressed "deep concern at the report that electronic
and telephone communications of Brazilian citizens are being the object of
espionage by organs of American intelligence.
"The Brazilian government has
asked for clarifications" through the U.S. Embassy in Brazil and Brazil's
embassy in Washington, he said.
Patriota also said Brazil will ask
the U.N. for measures "to impede abuses and protect the privacy" of
Internet users, laying down rules for governments "to guarantee cybernetic
security that protects the rights of citizens and preserves the sovereignty of
all countries."
The spokesman for the U.S. Embassy
in Brazil's capital, Dean Chaves, said diplomats there would not have any
comment.
But the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence issued a statement saying, "The U.S. government will
respond through diplomatic channels to our partners and allies in the Americas
... While we are not going to comment publicly on specific alleged intelligence
activities, as a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States
gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations."
The chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff warned Sunday that Snowden's overall disclosures have
undermined U.S. relationships with other countries and affected what he calls
"the importance of trust." Gen. Martin Dempsey told CNN's "State
of the Union" that the U.S. will "work our way back. But it has set
us back temporarily."
Patriota's reaction in Brazil
extended diplomatic turbulence the U.S. has faced from friends and foes around
the world since Snowden began releasing details of the surveillance.
Germany's top security official
suggested last month that Internet users could shun operations that use
U.S.-based computer servers to avoid security worries. France's Interior
Minister used a July 4 garden party at the U.S. Embassy in Paris to complain
about alleged U.S. spying, saying "such practices, if proven, do not have
their place between allies and partners."
Hong Kong officials last month
declined a U.S. request to extradite the former NSA contract worker amid
indications of displeasure over his revelation that the former British colony
had been a target of American hacking.
The O Globo article said that
"Brazil, with extensive digitalized public and private networks operated
by large telecommunications and internet companies, appears to stand out on
maps of the U.S. agency as a priority target for telephony and data traffic,
alongside nations such as China, Russia and Pakistan."
The report did not describe the
sort of data collected, but the U.S. programs appear to gather what is called
metadata: logs of message times, addresses and other information rather than
the content of the messages.
The report was co-authored by U.S.
journalist Glenn Greenwald, who originally broke the Snowden story in the
Britain-based Guardian newspaper, where he writes a regularly blog.
In a Sunday posting, Greenwald
wrote that "the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the
Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected
and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians."
He said Brazil was merely an
example of a global practice.
"There are many more
populations of non-adversarial countries which have been subjected to the same
type of mass surveillance net by the NSA: indeed, the list of those which
haven't been are shorter than those which have," he wrote.
The O Globo article said the NSA
collected the data through an association between U.S. and Brazilian
telecommunications companies. It said it could not verify which Brazilian
companies were involved or if they were aware their links were being used to
collect the data.
"It's most likely that any
monitoring was done of undersea cables and satellites. For international
transmissions and calls, the majority of the cables pass through the United
States," Paulo Bernardo, Brazil's communications minister, told O Globo.
"We're extremely concerned about this news, especially the possible involvement
of Brazilian companies. If that actually happened, it would be a crime under
Brazilian law."
Brazil was among several nations
asked to provide political asylum by Snowden in recent days. The foreign
ministry said last week that it did "not plan to respond" to the
leaker's request, though spokesmen declined to say they explicitly denied his
application. Other Latin American nations - Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua -
have already said they will grant asylum. On Sunday, Cuban President Raul
Castro said he supported those countries' apparent willingness to grant Snowden
asylum, but he did not say whether Cuba itself would offer him refuge or safe
passage.
While some Brazilians were upset by
the revelations, others seemed to shrug.
"On the one hand, the size of
the U.S. espionage program and the number of Brazilians who fell into it is
ridiculous," said Rodolfo Andrade, a 29-year-old businessman in Sao Paulo.
"On the other hand, it helps international security."
Associated Press writer Marco
Sibaja in Brasilia and John Rice in Mexico City contributed to this report.
Source:
AP,
via Julio Severo in English.
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