Brazil and the US

I must confess, I don’t have anything intelligent to say with respect to the revelations that the United States spies on Brazil. We are part of the database leaked by Edward Snowden, ex-technician for the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). But I need to deliver something [in writing] and speak of the matter, just as the Brazilian government does its part to express “grave concern” and the promise of investigations. And that’s the thing with espionage: It’s annoying to be spied on (Brazil) and annoying to be unmasked (United States).

My colleague Ricardo Setti wrote a comprehensive and illustrative piece about the importance of Brazil. For me, a joke comes to mind after reading this: It would be an insult if Brazil had not been spied on by the U.S. or by Uruguay, owing to its strategic economic and political importance. Also, there is that detail of geo-terrorism: the frontier with Paraguay and Argentina, the already legendary Triple Frontier.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist-activist who published the data that Snowden leaked to him, also offered a technical explanation. He said in an interview with Fantastico on TV Globo that Brazilian espionage could be an alternative for the U.S. to gain access to the more protected systems of countries such as China and Iran.

In the words of Greenwald: “We don’t have access to China’s system, but we have access to Brazil’s system. So [they] collect the traffic in Brazil not because we want to know what one Brazilian is saying to another Brazilian, but because we want to know what someone in China is saying to someone in Iran, for example.”

To finish off, here’s an illustrative French story. The venerable journal Le Monde revealed details last week about the apparatus of data collection, monitoring and espionage in France, which uses methods — leaked by Snowden — similar to those of the National Security Agency in the U.S. When the hacker who was working for Washington revealed that the Americans were spying on the Europeans, there was continental indignation, but French protest was faint.

As Le Monde put it, it was “for two excellent reasons: Paris already knew about it — and it’s doing exactly the same thing.” Using an expression from the Parisian journal, “Ce Big Brother français, petit frère des services américains, est clandestine.”

I don’t need to translate. Everyone does it. C’est la vie.