RT — Brazil-Europe undersea cable to hide web traffic from US snooping

A new underwater cable that is to link Brazil with Portugal will protect Latin American internet traffic from US surveillance, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff indicated after meeting the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council.

“We have to respect privacy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. We don't want businesses to be spied upon,”Rousseff told a joint news conference. 

Rousseff was among the world leaders who openly criticized the US after the revelation of the scale of its electronic surveillance program by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. She postponed a scheduled visit to America over a report that the US intelligence agency snooped on her emails and phone.

Not only Brazilian political leaders, but also captains of industry have been reportedly under US surveillance, including the oil giant Petrobras. Critics accused the US of using its intelligence capabilities for economic espionage that has nothing to do with national security.

RT
Brazil-Europe undersea cable to hide web traffic from US snooping

Glenn Greenwald — NSA’s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure

Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with The Intercept by WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency targeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozen top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane’s telephone was on the list. President Rousseff just yesterday returned to Brazil after a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit she had delayed for almost two years in anger over prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.

That Rousseff’s personal cell phone was successfully targeted by NSA spying was previously reported in 2013 by Fantastico, a program on the Brazilian television network Globo Rede. That revelation – along with others exposing NSA mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Brazilians, and the targeting of the country’s state-owned oil company Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy – caused a major rupture in relations between the two nations. But Rouseff is now suffering from severe domestic weakness as a result of various scandals and a weak economy, and apparently could no longer resist the perceived benefits of a high-profile state visit to Washington.

But these new revelations extend far beyond the prior ones and are likely to reinvigorate tensions. Beyond Rousseff, the new NSA target list includes some of Brazil’s most important political and financial figures, such as the Finance Ministry’s Executive Secretary Nelson Barbosa; Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, a top official with Brazil’s Central Bank; Luiz Eduardo Melin de Carvalho e Silva, former Chief of Staff to the Finance Minister; the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s chief of economics and finance, Luis Antônio Balduíno Carneiro; former Foreign Affairs Minister and Ambassador to the U.S. Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado; and Antonio Palocci, who formerly served as both Dilma’s Chief of Staff and Finance Minister under former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Most notable about the list, published simultaneously by WikiLeaks, is the predominance of officials responsible for Brazil’s financial and economic matters (last four digits of the listed telephone numbers are redacted; click to enlarge):...

The shoes continue to drop. Brazil ripped. US elite apoplectic.

The Intercept
NSA’s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure

Glenn Greenwald

France24 — Berlin spied on France for the NSA, German media say

German intelligence helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitor the French presidential palace and foreign ministry officials as well as members of the European Commission, Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Thursday.

Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency helped the NSA perform "political espionage" by watching "top officials at the French foreign ministry, the Elysée Palace and the European Commission", the German paper will report in an article to be published in its Thursday edition.

"The heart [of the problem] is political espionage of European neighbours and institutions of the European Union," the Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote, citing a source with knowledge of BND procedures.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government – which has long complained of being a target of snooping by the US – is now facing a series of embarrassing reports that German spies themselves acted on behalf of the NSA to monitor allies like France as well as German companies....

Political and economic espionage. With friends like these....

Angela has some 'splainin' to do.

France24

Berlin spied on France for the NSA, German media say

FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS

Bruce Livesey — The NSA Scandal is all about Economics

The revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden on the extent of the NSA’s reach and its ability to spy on Americans and citizens and political leaders of foreign countries, begs a big question: why are they doing all of this espionage?

During the Cold War, signals intelligence agencies focused mostly on the Soviet Union and its satellites and allies. But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, these agencies needed a new raison d’etre. In my 1998 Financial Post piece, I detailed how these agencies were now focusing on economic targets, such as spying on countries to glean information that would give them an advantage in trade talks, or allow multinationals to garner business deals to the detriment of their foreign competitors. “We were all looking at other ways of earning our living other than military and political intelligence,” Mike Frost, a former CSE operative who spent 18 years with the agency, told me when I was researching the Post story. “It was just a given we would be looking at economic things. We thought there was nothing wrong with this.”

For example, the CSE spied on South Korea while Canada was attempting to sell $6 billion worth of CANDU nuclear reactors to that country (presumably to ensure the deal went through). And it spied on Mexico during the 1992-93 NAFTA talks, again to garner advantages in those discussions.

In the current scandal over the NSA, it’s clear that the real intention of the agency’s spying on America’s so-called allies like Germany, Brazil, France and Spain, is solely for economic purposes. After all, these are not countries that are hotbeds of Islamic or al Qaeda terrorism that would justify this level of espionage.

The Progressive Economics Forum
The NSA Scandal is all about Economics
Bruce Livesey