Brazil, EU Take Pride In Temporarily Avoiding The NSA With New Joint Undersea Cable Run

from the undersea-blowback dept

Long before there was Edward Snowden (or even an NSA), there have, unsurprisingly, been government intelligence operatives gifted at tapping communications networks, be they via satellite dish or undersea cables. In fact, before Snowden, back when most people (including most of the press) treated total surveillance as the incoherent ramblings of paranoids, there was Echelon. The highly-confidential program, jointly operated by the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, truly took off in the 1960s, and focused on using any means necessary to gather communications intelligence. The program started with a focus on intercepting satellite lines, then shifted to undersea cable taps, microwave transmission intercepts, and other options.

Currently, Brazil (justly none too happy with our voracious surveillance appetites) relies on U.S. undersea cables to carry almost all of its communications to Europe. That should change soon with a joint announcement that Brazil and the EU are building an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to further reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States:

"At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance. "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 with the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council. "The Internet is one of the best things man has ever invented. So we agreed for the need to guarantee ... the neutrality of the network, a democratic area where we can protect freedom of expression," Rousseff said."

To pretend the NSA lacks the ability to simply tap this new cable run, nab that same data at any of a million interconnection points, or just get it handed to them by other intelligence agencies is perhaps either naive, a bit of political salesmanship for the project, or both. Still, it's another instance of how the NSA revelations have significantly tarnished international/U.S. relations, resulting in a large number of countries making it a point of pride to avoid using U.S. technology. That's not going to be particularly great for U.S. industry, and we're likely only just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Filed Under: brazil, echelon, european union, nsa, surveillance

Ed Snowden Sends Open Letter To Brazil... Which The Press Blatantly Misrepresents

from the nice-work,-journalists dept

This morning, a Brazilian publication, A Folha, released a very interesting open letter from Ed Snowden. It's worth reading in full, and we'll include the full thing beneath this post, but first, a few snippets. His summary of the overall situation is key:

Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.

American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not "surveillance," it's "data collection." They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

He then notes that some Brazilian politicians have asked for his assistance into researching what the US has done, and he said that he is willing to help "wherever appropriate and lawful" while also noting that the US pulling his passport and showing its willingness to force planes to land when it suspects Snowden may be on board may limit his effectiveness in helping with the investigation. There's a lot more in the letter as well, but the press seems to be summarizing it as "Snowden offers to swap helping investigating spying for asylum." A few examples:

• USA Today: Snowden to Brazil: Swap you spying help for asylum
• The Guardian: Edward Snowden offers to help Brazil over US spying in return for asylum
• CBS News: Edward Snowden reportedly tells Brazil he’ll help probe NSA spying there if granted asylum
• Fox News: Snowden reportedly offers to help Brazil investigate spying if given asylum
• Reuters: Snowden makes case for Brazil asylum, offers help
• ABC (Australia): Edward Snowden wants asylum in Brazil in exchange for help with investigations into NSA spying

All of these seem to think there's some sort of conditional there. Reading the actual letter, that doesn't seem to be the case at all. While he does mention that without being granted political asylum, the US government "will continue to interfere with my ability to speak," there does not appear to be any quid pro quo setup, in which he's asking for asylum. He's just laying out the situation. Furthermore, he later notes the value of being able to speak freely, and how that's more important than where he lives:

My act of conscience began with a statement: "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. That's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under."

Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

Of course, the absolute worst of the worst in reporting on this was... CNN. They posted a tweet, claiming that Snowden offered to "spy on the US." Seriously. Thankfully, after lots of people reacted angrily to that, CNN chose to delete the tweet. And people wonder why the media business is struggling these days.

Filed Under: asylum, brazil, ed snowden, journalism, nsa, open letter, surveillance

US Working Overtime Behind The Scenes To Kill UN Plan To Protect Online Privacy From Snooping

from the of-course-they-are dept

The UN has apparently been considering a proposal pushed by Brazil and Germany, to clarify that basic offline rights to privacy should apply to online information and activities as well. The proposal is targeted at attempts by governments -- mainly the US -- to ignore privacy issues in spying on people around the globe. Not surprisingly, the US is (quietly) working hard to stop this plan. Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy has the scoop, noting that publicly, the US is pretending to support this in some form:

But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights. The United States and its allies, according to diplomats, outside observers, and documents, contend that the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to foreign espionage.

In recent days, the United States circulated to its allies a confidential paper highlighting American objectives in the negotiations, "Right to Privacy in the Digital Age -- U.S. Redlines." It calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so "that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States' obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially." In other words: America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas.

The U.S. paper also calls on governments to promote amendments that would weaken Brazil's and Germany's contention that some "highly intrusive" acts of online espionage may constitute a violation of freedom of expression. Instead, the United States wants to limit the focus to illegal surveillance -- which the American government claims it never, ever does. Collecting information on tens of millions of people around the world is perfectly acceptable, the Obama administration has repeatedly said. It's authorized by U.S. statute, overseen by Congress, and approved by American courts.

While none of this creates any binding requirements, it does put tremendous pressure on countries to comply -- and could lead to more specific language in various treaties and other agreements as well. It also allows other countries to stand firmly on the moral high ground that the US pretends to stand on, in order to scold the US for its activities.

The US, of course, likes to pretend that it needs to violate everyone's privacy to catch a few bad guys. There is little reason to suggest this is true. Nothing in the proposal appears to stop legitimate law enforcement, espionage and surveillance efforts, targeted at actual people involved in criminal or terrorist activity. The issue is scooping up everyone's data "just because." That's not what US negotiators are saying, obviously. Instead, they argue they need to scoop up everyone's data to make the world safer by going after "international terrorists."

The US's stance here is fairly obvious. It wants to pretend to retain the moral high ground on this issue, and the way to do that is to try to stop the rest of the world from pointing out that it's been on the low road for quite some time. But trying to redraw the map doesn't change the reality.

Filed Under: brazil, germany, privacy, surveillance, un, us

If The NSA Isn't Engaged In Economic Espionage, Why Is The USTR Considered 'A Customer' Of Intelligence?

from the simple-questions dept

We just had a story about how Australia used its equivalent of the NSA to do economic espionage for the sake of improving trade deals and helping private companies by passing along useful info they gleaned from spying on the Japanese. It had become so common that companies getting the info would joke that it had "fallen off the back of a truck." Of course, many have argued that the US is obviously engaged in similar activity. The most damning evidence, of course, was the release a few months ago of details of how the NSA spied on Petrobas, the Brazilian oil giant.

The US has sworn up, down, left and right that it does not use the NSA for economic espionage. In August, the Department of Defense issued a statement to the Washington Post saying:

“The Department of Defense does engage” in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

Those triple stars were in the original. That was before the Petrobas revelation. After that came out, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tried to explain that away, arguing that it was not for economic espionage at all, but to get a better sense of whether there was an upcoming financial crisis.

What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.

Of course, it's a very blurry line between using that information to create policies that help US companies and just giving the information to them directly. Perhaps it's true that the NSA doesn't hand out the information it gleans from foreign companies directly to US companies to help them understand, say, how a foreign product is built -- but reverse engineering is pretty good these days, so it's doubtful that too many US companies need that kind of help anyway. Instead, it seems to be just as nefarious, and certainly a form of economic espionage, to use this information to create trade policies that clearly boost certain US interests.

But that's certainly happening. The NY Times' giant profile of the NSA's activities that came out earlier this month included a list of "customers" for the NSA. Pay close attention to the last two on the list:

This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency’s “customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.

Now, one can make a (potentially compelling) argument that of course it's US policy to try to improve situations for American companies. And that's perfectly reasonable -- but it seems like a clearly bogus argument for the NSA to say it "does not do economic espionage" just because it (allegedly) does not do one particular tidbit of economic espionage: directly handing companies information. If, instead, it's spying on foreign companies and then providing that information to the USTR, you can assure that two things are happening: economic policies that help the special interests that have a close relationship with the USTR are getting extra favorable policies in their place, and some of that information is seeping out of the USTR to those companies anyway.

And we've already seen, repeatedly, how the USTR appears to have very cozy relations with certain legacy industries, while having almost no relationship at all with younger, more innovative industries. As such, not only is the NSA clearly engaged in economic espionage, it's doing so to the detriment of actual innovation and economic growth, by using this information to prop up legacy industries, while handicapping the innovative industries.

Filed Under: australia, brazil, economic espionage, japan, nsa, surveillance, ustr
Companies: petrobas

Key Internet Institutions Ditch US Leadership; Brazil To Host Global Summit To Draw Up New Governance Model

from the payback-time dept

Here's a hugely important story that brings together three major threads. First, the continuing wrangling over the form that Internet governance should take. Second, the fact that NSA's massive surveillance operations around the world have included economic espionage. And third, Brazil's increasingly angry reaction to that spying. As a post from the Internet Governance Project explains:

the Directors of all the major Internet organizations -- ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries -- turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance.

Those directors have issued what they call the "Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation," which includes the following:

They called for accelerating the globalization of and functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.

That's a fairly clear call for the US to relinquish its dominant role. Another section hints at why this is happening now:

They expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance.

But this isn't just some vague but meaningless statement of annoyance: those involved have already started working on ways to replace current structures, as this story on the news24.com site reports:

Brazil, which has slammed massive US electronic spying on its territory, said on Wednesday it would host a global summit on internet governance in April.

President Dilma Rousseff made the announcement after conferring in Brasilia with Fadi Chehade, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

"We have decided that Brazil will host in April 2014 an international summit of governments, industry, civil society and academia" to discuss Brazil's suggestions for upgrading Internet security, Rousseff said on Twitter.

Once again, we see the NSA's reckless disregard for the consequences of its global surveillance -- far beyond what could be regarded as reasonable or proportionate -- is now having massive adverse effects on America's standing and influence in the world. The Internet Governance Project post puts it well:

Make no mistake about it: this is important. It is the latest, and one of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet. It's one thing when the government of Brazil, a longtime antagonist regarding the US role in Internet governance, gets indignant and makes threats because of the revelations. And of course, the gloating of representatives of the International Telecommunication Union could be expected. But this is different. Brazil's state is now allied with the spokespersons for all of the organically evolved Internet institutions, the representatives of the very "multi-stakeholder model" the US purports to defend. You know you've made a big mistake, a life-changing mistake, when even your own children abandon you en masse.

And before anyone tries to blame this latest development on Snowden, let's be clear that the problem is not that this activity has been revealed, but that the NSA was doing it in the first place.

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Filed Under: brazil, internet governance, nsa, nsa surveillance
Companies: icann, ietf, internet society, w3c

Brazilian President Blasts NSA Spying In Front Of World Leaders -- Including Obama -- At UN

from the just-listen-to-that dept

It was expected that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, would raise the issue of NSA spying when she addressed the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York this week. But few would have predicted that her speech would be quite so excoriating (pdf), especially since it was given in the presence of President Obama, who spoke immediately after her.

Rousseff launched straight into her denunciation of online spying:

Recent revelations concerning the activities of a global network of electronic espionage have caused indignation and repudiation in public opinion around the world.

She then went on to emphasize that Brazil seems to have suffered more than most in this matter, not least because of economic espionage and the targeting of politicians:

In Brazil, the situation was even more serious, as it emerged that we were targeted by this intrusion. Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information -- often of high economic and even strategic value -- was at the center of espionage activity. Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Office of the President of the Republic itself, had their communications intercepted. Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of International Law and is an affront to the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations. A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation. The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating fundamental human rights of citizens of another country.

Rousseff explicitly rejected the "because terrorism" excuse so often trotted out to justify such global surveillance:

The arguments that the illegal interception of information and data aims at protecting nations against terrorism cannot be sustained.

Brazil, Mr. President, knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbor terrorist groups.

She pointed out the key importance of the right to personal privacy and national sovereignty, both called into question by blanket surveillance:

As many other Latin Americans, I fought against authoritarianism and censorship, and I cannot but defend, in an uncompromising fashion, the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of my country. In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among Nations.

She reminded Obama that Brazil was still waiting for an explanation of the NSA's actions and a promise that they wouldn't happen again:

We expressed to the Government of the United States our disapproval, and demanded explanations, apologies and guarantees that such procedures will never be repeated.

The President of Brazil then confirmed that her country will be taking measures to protect itself better from future attempts to spy on its citizens and companies, but without going into details:

Brazil, Mr. President, will redouble its efforts to adopt legislation, technologies and mechanisms to protect us from the illegal interception of communications and data.

Finally, Rousseff called for the United Nations to get involved:

The United Nations must play a leading role in the effort to regulate the conduct of States with regard to these technologies.

For this reason, Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web.

That's unlikely to go down well with many Western countries, already worried about what form Internet governance will take in the future. But many emerging nations would be happy to reduce the influence of the West, especially the US, on how the Internet is run, and would doubtless support any such initiative at the UN.

Even if it's unlikely that Rousseff's speech will lead to any immediate actions -- either by the US or by the United Nations -- it confirms the emergence of Brazil as an increasingly powerful and independent force in the world. Rousseff's stinging rebuke to the US contrasts with the feeble protests from just a few European Union politicians, even though their citizens and institutions have been spied upon comprehensively by the NSA and GCHQ for years. Once again we are seeing interesting knock-on consequences of Snowden's leaks, with the standing of Brazil and the other BRICS countries rising even as those of the US and EU begin to fall.

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Filed Under: barack obama, brazil, dilma rousseff, nsa, nsa surveillance, un, us

Angered By The NSA, But Confused By Acronyms, Brazilian Hacker Defaces NASA Websites

from the take-that,-surveillancestronauts! dept

If you're going to go after the world leader in untargeted data collections, you might as well be just as unfocused. After details of the NSA's spying efforts in Brazil drove the president to cancel her trip to the US, some of that anger spilled over to the public. And a certain member of the Brazilian public, one "BMPoc," decided to lash out in the most internet of ways -- by defacing websites linked with the intelligence agency. The only problem was BMPoC was one letter off.

Multiple NASA websites were defaced last week by a Brazilian hacktivist who may have misread the sites' URLs, because he wasn't protesting about the US space agency giving joyrides to inhuman stowaways – he was protesting against NSA spying.

“BMPoC” hit kepler.arc.nasa.gov and 13 other sites with messages protesting against US spying on Brazil, as well as a possible US military intervention in Syria.

Ah, NASA. The non-spy agency whose efforts over the years have resulted in a number of technological advancements we take for granted. NASA is a very, very, VERY outwardly focused agency, which perhaps explains why its internal controls are so lax it's referred to as the "low hanging fruit" of the government website defacement field.

What the hacker lacked in accuracy, he made up for in successful hits and enthusiasm. The following warning graced unsuspecting NASA aficionados for several hours earlier this week.

NASA HACKED! BY #BMPoCWe! Stop spy on us! The Brazilian population do not support your attitude! The Illuminati are now visibly acting!

Obama heartless! Inhumane! you have no family? the point in the entire global population is supporting you. NOBODY! We do not want war, we want peace!!! Do not attack the Syrians.

Coherent, it is not, thanks to the language barrier, a fundamental misunderstanding that all acronyms are not created equal, and the obligatory Illuminati reference. NASA, duly chastened by orders to cease all "spy" and change its unsupported attitude, released the following statement.

"A Brazilian hacker group posted a political message on a number of NASA websites. ... Within hours of the initial posting, information technology staff at the Ames Research Center discovered the message and immediately started an investigation, which is ongoing," he said. "At no point were any of the agency’s primary websites, missions or classified systems compromised."

In other words, the attack was about as harmful as graffiti. Perhaps even safer considering it wasn't scrubbed off the "walls" by a group of low-level criminals putting in community service hours.

Other than the wrong acronym and the Illuminati, BMPoC is absolutely correct. Brazilians do not support the NSA's spying or attitude and most of the world is very definitely not supportive of the US engaging with Syria. (Well, "engaging" by way of bombs, missiles and boots on the ground, anyway.)

If the secret to fighting a successful battle is knowing your enemy, BMPoC is no Sun Tzu (or even Ambrose Burnside, for that matter). On the plus side, website defacing is much more anonymous and less prone to crippling embarrassment than an in-person protest -- especially one that finds the protester a few blocks away from his or her intended target, yelling at equally confused people about actions they never took and things they never said.

Filed Under: brazil, hackers, nasa, nsa, nsa surveillance, protest

More NSA Spying Fallout: Brazilian President Snubs Obama Invitation, May Trigger Internet Balkanization

from the this-is-getting-serious dept

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)

Despite the framing that this is merely a "postponement" until the US has provided satisfactory explanations of the NSA's behavior, it's a real slap in the face for President Obama -- in the past, no national leader would dream of snubbing the US in this way -- and a measure of how seriously the NSA's activities are affecting US standing in the world. But this is not just about symbolic actions like cancelling high-level meetings: there are also likely to be longer-term repercussions for both US companies and the whole Internet.

For example, Rousseff is making a speech next week at the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York. According to O Globo, she will raise the issue of American spying there, and call for a ban on espionage conducted by means of the Internet. Meanwhile, an Associated Press story published by the Washington Post has some details of other actions that Rousseff intends to take in an effort to protect Brazilians from online snooping in the future:

Most of Brazil's global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff's government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

Of course, the problem is that then it will be the UK's GCHQ and other European agencies that start spying on Brazilian traffic, rather than the NSA. Here's another idea that the President of Brazil wants to see realised:

Rousseff is urging Brazil's Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley's bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs: Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube.

Whether or not that helps to secure the personal data of Brazilians, such a move will almost certainly increase the costs for US Internet companies operating in Brazil -- more bad news for them, all thanks to the NSA. But there may be even worse in store for the Internet as a whole, as the AP article points out:

The effort by Latin America's biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say.

This is just what many people feared: that the leaks about the NSA's massive surveillance activities around the world -- including economic espionage -- will provide the pretext repressive regimes need in order to take complete technical control of the Internet in their countries, rather than continuing to acquiesce in its global governance, as at present. And so all the efforts by Western countries at the recent World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to stop precisely that kind of balkanization will have been in vain.

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Filed Under: barack obama, brazil, dilma rousseff, internet, nsa, nsa surveillance, politics, snub

Latest Leak Shows NSA Engaging In Economic Espionage -- Not Fighting Terrorism

from the flying-pigs dept

As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:

"The Department of Defense does engage" in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. "The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber."

Despite the screaming asterisks, like many other statements on the subject from the NSA, this one turns out to be untrue, as the Brazlian TV program "Fantastico" revealed on Sunday, drawing on new leaked documents provided by Glenn Greenwald, who lives in the country:

The internal computer network of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant partly owned by the state, has been under surveillance by the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States.

…

a top secret presentation dated May 2012 is used by the NSA to train new agents step-by-step how to access and spy upon private computer networks -- the internal networks of companies, governments, financial institutions -- networks designed precisely to protect information.

The name of Petrobras -- Brazil's largest company -- appears right at the beginning, under the title: "MANY TARGETS USE PRIVATE NETWORKS."

…

The name of Petrobras appears on several slides, as the training goes deeper in explaining how data from the target companies is monitored.

The Fantastico article goes on to give more information about the attacks on the company's internal networks, and points out that Petrobras is hardly a terrorist organization:

The yearly profits of Petrobras are over 280 billion reais -- US$ 120 billion. More than the GDP of many countries. And there are plenty of motives for spies to want access to the company's protected network.

Here's one of them:

For example, the details of each lot in an auction [of oil drilling rights] set for next month: for exploration of the Libra Field, in the Bay of Santos, part of the Pre-salt. Whether the spies had access to this information is one of the questions the Brazilian government will have to put to the United States.

Former Petrobras Director Roberto Villa considers this the greatest auction in the history of oil exploration. "It's a very peculiar auction. The auction of an area where we already know there's oil, there's no risk", he says. What no one else should know, Villa says, is which are the richest lots. "Petrobras knows. And I hope only they know." He considers that such information, if stolen, could give someone an advantage. "Someone would have an edge. If this information was leaked and someone else has obtained it, he would be in a privileged position at the auction. He'll know where to invest and where not to. It's a handy little secret."

Once again, the NSA's rebuttal of these claims is weak and unconvincing:

It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.

We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.

Or, you know, it could provide US companies with insights about which were the best lots in the forthcoming auction of seabed areas for oil exploration, or about highly-specialized deep-sea oil extraction technology, in which Petrobas is a world leader. After all, why wouldn't the NSA drop some useful hints about such things to US companies as a way of justifying its huge budget?

This latest attack on Brazil's flagship enterprise will make the country's already strained relationship with the US even more difficult. But the Fantastico story on the NSA program, which is apparently called "Royal Net", is about much more than those bilateral relations:

Besides Petrobras, e-mail and internet services provider Google's infrastructure is also listed as a target. The company, often named as collaborating with the NSA, is shown here as a victim.

Other targets include French diplomats -- with access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France -- and the SWIFT network, the cooperative that unites over ten thousand banks in 212 countries and provides communications that enable international financial transactions.

There are also first details of other, hitherto unknown, spying programs and capabilities:

The NSA presentation contains documents prepared by the GCHQ -- the British Spy agency, from a country that appears as an ally of the United States in spying. The British agency shows how two spy programs operate. "Flying Pig" and "Hush Puppy" also monitor private networks which carry supposedly secure information. These networks are known as TLS/SSL.

The presentation explains how data is intercepted, through an attack known as "Man in the Middle". In this case, data is rerouted to the NSA central, and then relayed to its destination, without either end noticing.

This confirmation that man-in-the-middle attacks are used by the NSA to intercept data, along with detailed information about the high-level economic espionage that is going on, underlines why the Fantastico report is so important, and why it is well-worth reading in its entirety.

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Filed Under: brazil, economic espionage, nsa, nsa surveillance, surveillance
Companies: petrobas

Brazilian President Possibly Canceling US Visit, $4 Billion Fighter Jet Order Over NSA's Snooping

from the the-NSA:-taking-down-the-country-from-the-inside dept

The fallout from the leaked NSA documents is apparently neverending. Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, has canceled her advance team's trip to Washington, DC. A high-ranking official stated the president was "furious" after information surfaced about the NSA's actions via a report by Globo TV.

The Globo report that aired Sunday was based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden to U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro and worked with the network on the story. Most of Greenwald’s stories on the NSA program have been published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The report said the U.S. agency mapped out the aides with whom Rousseff communicated and tracked patterns of how those aides communicated with one another and also third parties, according to a June 2012 NSA document. Greenwald said the document, while not containing excerpts of Rousseff communications, made it clear that U.S. officials were reading her emails and text messages.

Rousseff had been extended a formal invitation by the administration to a "full state dinner," the only such invitation handed out this year, but it appears the Brazilian president is unwilling to entertain the offer, thanks to the administration's handling of the spying allegations.

[T]he official, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the episode, said Rousseff feels "patronized" by the U.S. response so far to the Globo report.

While it is common for state intelligence agencies to spy on other nations, the unwritten rule has always been, "don't get caught." Thanks to Snowden's leaks, the NSA has broken this rule, albeit more out of internal carelessness that led to the documents' escape, rather than through the carelessness of active agents.

The end result, however, is the same: another chilled international relationship and another one that the administration seems uninterested in rekindling. Rather than mend these fences, the administration seems to be putting more of its energy into playing defense.

But there's more on the line than some national embarrassment. Once again, allegations of spying are hurting American businesses. Not only does it appear that Rousseff with stand up Obama at the state dinner, but it also looks like a $4 billion deal to purchase F-18 fighters might evaporate as well. This is in addition to other mutually-beneficial agreements revolving around biofuels and oil.

The administration may be playing it safe and attempting to downplay the NSA's activities, but that only seems to be adding to the damage. As noted above, Rousseff felt "patronized" by the US government's response to the allegations. Brazil's Communications Minister Paulo Bernardo's assessment of the written response provided by the administration is even harsher.

Bernardo... said Brazil had yet to receive any "reasonable" explanation from the United States.

"All of the explanations that have been given to us from the beginning of these episodes have proven to be false," Bernardo said. "I think it's indiscriminate spying that has nothing to do with national security ... It's espionage with a commercial, industrial aim."

And that's the crux of the problem with the administration's response to these leaks. Rather than address the fact that many people feel violated by the surveillance, it instead doles out talking points about targeting, oversight, legality and security, when not issuing denials that are swiftly proven false. There's very little attempt to discuss the what bothers people about the NSA's actions -- the "why." Justification for these programs is always delivered in meaningless buzzwords and assertions that the NSA's activities are all very tightly controlled are delivered in words that have been stripped of their meaning by high-ranking intelligence officials.

It's not just Brazil that feels "patronized" by this "don't worry about it -- it's for your own good and it's all legal" treatment. It's everyone. While it may be the accepted m.o. for national intelligence agencies to play spy vs. spy, it's quite another to find out you've been directly targeted, no matter what your position, especially if you head a country that isn't directly antagonistic to the United States.

Filed Under: brazil, dilma rousseff, fallout, nsa, nsa surveillance