{"id":60686,"date":"2015-07-06T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60686"},"modified":"2015-07-06T09:40:24","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T08:40:24","slug":"nsas-top-brazilian-political-and-financial-targets-revealed-by-new-wikileaks-disclosure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/nsas-top-brazilian-political-and-financial-targets-revealed-by-new-wikileaks-disclosure\/","title":{"rendered":"NSA\u2019s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Patsy<\/a>

Patsy Lynch\/REX Shutterstock\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Jul 2015 – <\/em>Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with\u00a0The Intercept\u00a0<\/em>by\u00a0WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency\u00a0targeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozen\u00a0top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country\u2019s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane\u2019s telephone was on the list. President Rousseff\u00a0just yesterday returned to Brazil\u00a0after\u00a0a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit\u00a0she had delayed for almost two years in anger over\u00a0prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.<\/p>\n

That Rousseff\u2019s personal cell phone was successfully targeted by NSA spying\u00a0was previously reported<\/a> in 2013 by Fantastico, <\/em>a program on\u00a0the Brazilian television network Globo Rede. That revelation \u2013\u00a0along with others exposing\u00a0NSA mass surveillance on\u00a0hundreds of millions of Brazilians<\/a>, and the targeting of\u00a0the country\u2019s state-owned oil company Petrobras<\/a>\u00a0and its Ministry of Mines and Energy<\/a> \u2013 caused a major rupture<\/a> in relations between the two nations.<\/a>\u00a0But\u00a0Rouseff\u00a0is\u00a0now suffering\u00a0from severe domestic weakness<\/a> as a result of various scandals and a weak economy, and\u00a0apparently could no longer resist\u00a0the perceived benefits of a high-profile state visit to\u00a0Washington.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s most important political and financial figures, such as\u00a0the Finance Ministry\u2019s Executive Secretary Nelson Barbosa; Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, a top official with Brazil\u2019s Central Bank; Luiz Eduardo Melin de Carvalho e Silva, former Chief of Staff to the Finance Minister; the Foreign Affairs Ministry\u2019s chief of economics and finance,\u00a0Luis Ant\u00f4nio Baldu\u00edno Carneiro; former Foreign Affairs Minister and Ambassador to the U.S. Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado;\u00a0<\/strong>and Antonio Palocci, who formerly served as both Dilma\u2019s Chief of Staff and Finance Minister under former president Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva.<\/p>\n

Most notable about the list, published simultaneously\u00a0by WikiLeaks, is the predominance of officials responsible for Brazil\u2019s financial and economic matters (last four digits of the listed telephone numbers are redacted; click to enlarge)<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"wikileaks1<\/a><\/p>\n

Next to each name on the list, there are codes which\u00a0indicate the purpose of the surveillance and the group of analysts within NSA responsible for it. The codes appear under under the column entitled \u201cTOPI,\u201d which stands for \u201cTarget Office of Primary Interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside most of the government officials\u2019 phone numbers is the designator \u201cS2C42,\u201d a reference to an NSA unit that focuses on intelligence collected from Brazil\u2019s political leadership. The same code was seen in the previously reported document revealing NSA\u2019s targeting of Dilma\u2019s cellphone:<\/p>\n

\"dilma-540x443<\/a><\/p>\n

But even more revealing on this new list is the designation next to several of the targeted officials responsible for financial and economic issues. Many of\u00a0these individuals have a different code next to their phone number \u2013 S2C51 \u2013 which refers to NSA\u2019s \u201cinternational financial policy branch.\u201d Brazilians are particularly sensitive to economic espionage by the U.S., both for historical reasons (as\u00a0a hallmark of American imperialism and domination on the continent) and due to current economic concerns (for that reason, the story of NSA\u2019s\u00a0targeting of\u00a0Petrobras was arguably the most consequential of all prior surveillance\u00a0stories).<\/p>\n

Several Brazilian officials expressed anger over\u00a0the latest revelations. Gilberto Carvalho,\u00a0former Chief of Staff\u00a0to Lula and a top aide to Dilma, harshly denounced the spying in an interview with\u00a0the Intercept<\/em>. He described his reaction as\u00a0\u201cmaximum indignation,\u201d declaring it a \u201cviolation of Brazilian sovereignty\u201d which the U.S. \u201cdoes not have the right to do.\u201d\u00a0Carvalho\u00a0added that the fact that Brazil\u00a0\u201cis trying to repair\u00a0our relationship with the U.S. does not in any way diminish the gravity of these new revelations.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, the Central Bank\u2019s\u00a0Pereira da Silva said his reaction is to fully embrace\u00a0the stinging denunciation of NSA\u2019s electronic surveillance contained in Dilma\u2019s September, 2013 United Nations speech<\/a>, delivered while Obama waited in the hallway to speak. That blistering speech was widely regarded in Brazil as a high point of Dilma\u2019s leadership on the world stage.<\/p>\n

Speaking from the General Assembly podium, she declared that \u201ctampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront of the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations.\u201d She condemned\u00a0U.S. mass surveillance as a \u201cgrave violation of human rights and of civil liberties\u201d and,\u00a0in a rare invocation of her own personal history as a rebel against the country\u2019s oppressive military dictatorship, said: \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other Brazilian targets on the newly released NSA list include the\u00a0long-time diplomat and author\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Amado, as well as a current official with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Fernando Meirelles de Azevedo Pimentel. It also includes the \u201ccell\u201d numbers for several of the key targets along with their office numbers. And it lists the Brazilian ambassadors in Paris, Berlin and Geneva, with the official \u201cresidence\u201d of the latter targeted.<\/p>\n

Questions submitted to NSA were not answered by\u00a0the time of publication. Prior to the disclosure about its spying on Petrobras, the NSA insisted to\u00a0the Washington Post<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that (emphasis in original)\u00a0\u201cthe department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.\u201d In response to\u00a0the Petrobras report, however, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said<\/a> that \u201cit is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters\u201d but claimed that it does not \u201cuse our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of \u2013 or give intelligence we collect to \u2013 US companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The list obtained by The Intercept<\/em> from WikiLeaks\u00a0is extracted from an NSA database.\u00a0Dates that appear on it\u00a0indicate that the eavesdropping on several of the officials began in early 2011, but others were first targeted in 2010 while Lula, Rousseff\u2019s predecessor,\u00a0was still President. There is no indication\u00a0that the surveillance has stopped. Rather than a one-time document created on a single day, the list\u00a0appears to be an aggregate\u00a0list of targets continually compiled and updated by the NSA. Last week, WikiLeaks released similar documents showing surveillance of French and German political and financial officials, and that spying took place over many years.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Ryan Gallagher.<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the authors: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Jul 2015 – 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}