The National Security Agency’s spy programme targeted the communications of the Brazilian and Mexican presidents, and in the case of Mexico’s leader accessed the content of e-mails before he was elected, the US journalist who obtained secret documents from NSA leaker Edward Snowden said.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, told Globo’s news program “Fantastico” yesterday that a document dated June 2012 shows that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s e-mails were being read. The document’s date is a month before Pena Nieto was elected.
The document on which Greenwald based the report includes communications from Pena Nieto indicating who he would like to name to some Government posts among other information. It’s not clear if the spying continues.
As for Brazil’s leader, the June 2012 document “doesn’t include any of Dilma’s specific intercepted messages, the way it does for Nieto,” Greenwald told The Associated Press in an e-mail. “But it is clear in several ways that her communications were intercepted, including the use of DNI Presenter, which is a programme used by NSA to open and read e-mails and online chats.”
The US targeting mapped out the aides with whom Rousseff communicated and went a level further by tracking patterns of how those aides communicated with one another and also third parties, according to the document.
Calls to Rousseff’s office and a spokeswoman were not answered. Messages sent to a spokesman for Nena Pieto weren’t immediately returned. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said it had no comment.
Brazilian Justice Minister Eduardo Cardozo told the newspaper O Globo that “if the facts of the report are confirmed, they would be considered very serious and would constitute a clear violation of Brazil’s sovereignty.”
“This is completely outside the standard of confidence expected of a strategic partnership, as the US and Brazil have,” he added.
In July, Greenwald co-wrote articles in O Globo that said documents leaked by Snowden indicate Brazil was the largest target in Latin America for the NSA programme, which collected data on billions of e-mails and calls flowing through Brazil.
The Brazilian Government denounced the NSA activities outlined in the earlier reports. Greenwald reported then that the NSA collected the data through an undefined association between US and Brazilian telecommunications companies. He said he could not verify which Brazilian companies were involved or if they were aware their links were being used to collect the data.