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2 September 2013

NSA Spying Brazil and Mexico Presidents

Related TV show screen shots: http://cryptome.org/2013-info/09/nsa-br-mx/nsa-br-mx.htm

Translation by Google, tidied by Cryptome.


http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/documentos-revelam-esquema-de-
agencia-dos-eua-para-espionar-dilma-rousseff.html

O Globo (Brazil)

Fantastico

Issue of the day 01/09/2013

01/09/2013 23h07 - Updated 01/09/2013 23h32

Spying documents reveal U.S. agency spied Dilma

Fantastic features an exclusive story revealing: how the greatest spy system in the world has its eye on Brazil.

We will tell you, step by step, as the National Security Agency of the United States can monitor the communications center of power in Brasilia. Including President Dilma Rousseff.

The report is by Bridi Sonia and Glenn Greenwald.

The documents classified secret, are part of a presentation to the internal personnel of the  National Security Agency of the United States. A code indicates this.

They show the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and what would be his top aides, as a direct target of the NSA spying.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-author of this report, was the one who received the papers from the hands of Edward Snowden, former NSA analyst who left the United States with the leading spy agency documents, with the intention to spread the American espionage system throughout the world.

Fantastic: When did you get these documents from Edward Snowden?

Glenn Greenwald: It was the first week of June, when I was with him in Hong Kong. He gave me these documents with all other documents in the original package.

The package had thousands of secret documents. Glenn reviewed these papers with Snowden during a week in Hong Kong. Shortly after Snowden fled to Russia, where he spent 38 days in the transit area of the airport in Moscow, until the country accepted his application for asylum.

During the production of this report, Fantastic spoke with Snowden through a chat program protected from eavesdropping. Hidden somewhere in the Russian territory, he said that due to a requirement of the local government he can not comment on the content of the papers, but says that the consequences and repercussions of the documents affect the world, including Brazil.

Fantastic: How can we evaluate the document and whether there have been transactions that were consummated and not just projects?

Glenn Greenwald: It was very clear from these documents that NSA had already done the spying because they are not discussing that it is only something they are planning. They are celebrating the success of the espionage.

Documents obtained exclusively by Fantastic show that espionage was done against communications with President Dilma top aides indicated by these points. It also spied communications between advisors and third parties.

The secret presentation is called: "Smart Filtering data: case study of Mexico and Brazil."

According to the presentation, the program enables finding, whenever you want, a needle in a haystack.

The haystack, in this case, is the immense volume of information that U.S. intelligence has access to every day, spying phone networks, internet servers, e-mail and social networks. The needle is who they choose.

In the document, dated June 2012, there are two targets: the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, then candidate leading in the polls for the presidency, and the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.

It works like this: the selected targets are monitored by phone numbers, emails and IP, the computer identification. The same for the interlocutors chosen in the case, advisors. What they call 'leap', is all communication between the targets and the assessors. A hop and a half, when advisors talk to them. Two jumps when they talk to other people.

To spy the then Mexican candidate Peña Nieto, the S2C, the NSA international security service for Latin America, mounted an intensive operation.

For this, it used two programs. One is called "Mainway", which collects the large volume of information passing through networks.

Text messages by telephone of the candidate were also intercepted, using the "Association", which gathers information circulating on social networks.

Then the messages go to another filter, "Dishfire" which searches for certain keywords.

Listed under the "interesting messages" is proof that the content of messages was retrieved.

Two passages are quoted. In one of them, even the presidential candidate of Mexico, Peña Nieto, in discussion with some of his ministers, who would take possession only six months after the election.

Following comes the explanation of how espionage was executed against President Dilma. "Goal" is the goal of the operation: "to improve understanding of the methods of communication and the interlocutors of the President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and his top aides."

What they call "seeds" are the email addresses and phone numbers monitored. One of the programs used by the NSA is called "DNI selectors", which according to another document leaked by Snowden, capture everything the user does on the internet, including the content of e-mails and websites visited.

A following graph [not published] shows the entire communications network of the president with his aides. Each dot represents a person. But the enlarged image shows that captions or names of those who had intercepted communications were deleted for presentation.

In the document there are no examples of calls or messages between the president and his ministers, as happened when the now president of Mexico was mentioned.

But on the last page the document says that the espionge method used is a "simple and effective filter that allows for data that are not available otherwise. And that can be repeated." Can be repeated, seems to mean that it was carried out.

And more. It concludes by saying that the union of two NSA sectors had success against top targets: Brazil and Mexico. Top targets, they know the danger of espionage and to protect your communication. Again, if it was successful because they were real examples.

In July, a report in the O Globo newspaper, also shown in Fantastic, as revealed by leaked documents from Snowden, the United States intercepted communications of millions of Brazilians.

At the time, the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon, denied that the contents of the calls and emails from Brazilian citizens were being spied on. He admitted only that the NSA accesses called metadata, which is the total technical connections, passing through Brazil.

It is unclear whether the interception of calls President Dilma was made only by access to communication networks, or whether there was involvement of spies in Brazilian territory.

James Bramford, expert who wrote three books on the NSA, spoke with the Fantastic in Washington.

He says that the NSA has spies in U.S. embassies and consulates around the world.

"We have a large embassy in Brasilia and a consulate in Rio de Janeiro. The NSA operates in these buildings. Antennas in the embassies can intercept microwave signals and cell phones," James Bramford says.

Also in Hong Kong, when he met Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden spoke of documents involving espionage against President Dilma.

He said: "the tactics of the U.S. government since September 11 is to say that everything is justified by terrorism. Scaring people to accept these measures as necessary. But most of the spying they do does not have anything to do with national security, it is to obtain an unfair advantage over other nations in their industrial and commerce economic agreements. "

Last month the magazine published exclusively a document proving that American intelligence is also commercial.

This is a letter written by the current U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Thomas Shannon, in 2009, when he was with the secretary of state.

He thanks the NSA for the information passed to American diplomacy before the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a meeting between the heads of state of the continent to discuss the region's commercial and diplomatic affairs.

In the letter, Thomas Shannon wrote: "more than 100 reports we received from the agency gave us a deep understanding of the plans and intentions of other summit participants and allowed our diplomats to be well prepared to advise President Obama on how to deal with controversial issues."

"On trade issues, we know what others are thinking before the multilateral meetings, how to play poker by knowing which cards everyone has at the table," James Bramford says.

Another document obtained exclusively by Fantastic says that an entire division of the NSA is dedicated to international policy and commercial activities, with a sector in charge of Western Europe, Japan, Mexico and Brazil.

A third-secret document lists the geopolitical challenges of the United States for the years 2014-2019.

The emergence of Brazil and Turkey on the global stage is classified as a risk to regional stability. And Brazil appears again, along with other countries, as a question in the American diplomatic scene: would our country be friend, enemy or problem? Also mentioned are Egypt, India, Iran, Turkey, Mexico, and other countries.

"When the country is more independent, stronger, like Brazil. Competing with the United States, with American companies. And because of that, the U.S. government is thinking differently about Brazil," Glenn says.

Why did Edward Snowden makes public those documents?

"He told me, 'Look, I think the American's privacy is very important, but I also think the privacy of foreign people in Latin America, the Brazilians are also very important. Of equal importance. And I do not want to protect the privacy of U.S. only. I want to protect the privacy of all people '," Glenn says.

This week the newspaper "Washington Post" published the secret budget of U.S. intelligence services, equivalent to U.S. $126 billion.