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 inrelations 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):
Next to each name on the list, there are codes
which indicate the purpose of the surveillance and the group of analysts
within NSA responsible for it. The codes appear under under the column entitled
“TOPI,” which stands for “Target Office of Primary Interest.”
Alongside most of the government officials’ phone
numbers is the designator “S2C42,” a reference to an NSA unit that focuses on
intelligence collected from Brazil’s political leadership. The same code was
seen in the previously reported document revealing NSA’s targeting of Dilma’s
cellphone:
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 these individuals have a different code next
to their phone number – S2C51 – which refers to NSA’s “international financial
policy branch.” Brazilians are particularly sensitive to economic espionage by
the U.S., both for historical reasons (as a hallmark of American
imperialism and domination on the continent) and due to current economic
concerns (for that reason, the story of NSA’s targeting of Petrobras
was arguably the most consequential of all prior surveillance stories).
Several Brazilian officials expressed anger
over the latest revelations. Gilberto Carvalho, former Chief of
Staff to Lula and a top aide to Dilma, harshly denounced the spying in an
interview with the Intercept. He described his reaction
as “maximum indignation,” declaring it a “violation of Brazilian
sovereignty” which the U.S. “does not have the right to
do.” Carvalho added that the fact that Brazil “is trying to
repair our relationship with the U.S. does not in any way diminish the
gravity of these new revelations.”
For his part, the Central Bank’s Pereira da Silva
said his reaction is to fully embrace the stinging denunciation of NSA’s
electronic surveillance contained in Dilma’s September, 2013 United
Nations speech,
delivered while Obama waited in the hallway to speak. That blistering speech
was widely regarded in Brazil as a high point of Dilma’s leadership on the
world stage.
Speaking from the General Assembly podium, she
declared that “tampering 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.” She
condemned U.S. mass surveillance as a “grave violation of human rights and
of civil liberties” and, in a rare invocation of her own personal history
as a rebel against the country’s oppressive military dictatorship, said: “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.”
Other Brazilian targets on the newly released NSA list
include the long-time diplomat and author André Amado, as well as a
current official with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Fernando Meirelles de
Azevedo Pimentel. It also includes the “cell” 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 “residence” of the latter
targeted.
Questions submitted to NSA were not answered
by the time of publication. Prior to the disclosure about its spying on
Petrobras, the NSA insisted to the Washington
Post that (emphasis
in original) “the department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage
in any domain, including cyber.” In response to the Petrobras report,
however, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that “it is not a secret that the Intelligence
Community collects information about economic and financial matters” but
claimed that it does not “use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal
the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we
collect to – US companies.”
The list obtained by The Intercept from
WikiLeaks is extracted from an NSA database. Dates that appear on
it indicate that the eavesdropping on several of the officials began in
early 2011, but others were first targeted in 2010 while Lula, Rousseff’s
predecessor, was still President. There is no indication that the
surveillance has stopped. Rather than a one-time document created on a single
day, the list appears to be an aggregate list 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.
Photo: Patsy Lynch/REX Shutterstock/AP
Additional reporting by Ryan Gallagher
Email the authors: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com,
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