The Patriot Act of the United States

On Aug. 13, the Brazilian Chancellor Antonio Patriota said that if the United States does not satisfactorily explain the revelations of espionage against Brazilian citizens it will cast a shadow of mistrust over their bilateral relations.

Since the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001, there is no privacy. Barack Obama admitted it upon announcing measures to provide “more transparency” and “citizen confidence” to these types of activities, including the modification of the Patriot Act which, after the attacks on the twin towers, granted a great deal of discretion on the subject.

Edward Snowden made unheard-of revelations about the Orwellian surveillance of worldwide communications the United States is directly being accused of. Through leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post, he uncovered the existence of secret programs that allow spying on the communications of millions of citizens globally by the United States government.

The first program came about in 2006 through Verizon, which consisted of spying on all telephone calls made inside the United States as well as those originating there that were directed to countries abroad. In 2008 another program called PRISM was implemented, supposedly for the purposes of gathering data sent over the Internet — email, photos, chats, social networking sites, credit cards, etc. — but only by foreigners residing outside of U.S. territory. According to Barack Obama, both programs were secretly approved by the U.S. Congress, and he is kept constantly informed of their progress.

The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the secret spy program PRISM, which authorizes the NSA and FBI to gain access to the servers of the Internet’s main companies by means of infringing on communications. The United States analyzes the archives, audio recordings, videos, emails and photographs of their users. PRISM is the NSA’s most useful tool for creating the reports that are delivered daily to Obama.

According to the newspapers, the president ordered his intelligence agencies in the White House — NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. — to make a list of the countries most susceptible to being “cyberattacked” by Washington. The Guardian leaked the existence of another program that allows the NSA to classify gathered information based on its origin, a practice aimed at external cyberespionage, which to date has allowed for the collection of more than 3 billion bits of computer data in the United States.

Thanks to Snowden’s leaks, both newspapers have continued revealing new cyberespionage programs and surveillance of communications in countries around the world. The NSA has built an infrastructure to intercept any kind of communication. With such techniques, the majority of [the data] is stored with the intention that it be used at a moment’s notice toward a certain objective.

The National Security Agency located in Fort Meade, Maryland, is the most important agency but also the least well-known; the majority of Americans are unaware of its existence. It controls the main part of the budget for intelligence services. It owns and operates the bulk of the secret data collection systems, the worldwide satellite networks, dozens of listening points, thousands of computers and huge forests of antennas situated in the hills of West Virginia.

Spying on spies is one of their specialties — that is, intelligence services of all world powers, be they friends or enemies. For example, during the Falklands War of 1982 the NSA deciphered the secret code of the Argentine Intelligence Services and passed crucial information about the Argentine forces to the British.

The NSA’s interception system discretely captures any email, Internet query or international telephone call. In all, such communications constitute the main source of clandestine information for the U.S. government.

The NSA works closely with the mysterious Echelon system. Echelon was created in secret after World War II for five Anglo-Saxon powers: Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Nowadays, it is the source for clandestine information for the Israelis.