Brazil Voices ‘Deep Concern’ Over Gathering of Data by US

The international tensions stirred up by recent revelations about American spying spread to yet another nation on Sunday, when Brazil’s foreign minister expressed “deep concern” over the issue and said his government would press the United Nations to take action that “preserves the sovereignty of all countries.”
Reacting to a local news report asserting that the United States has been collecting data on telephone calls and e-mail traffic in Brazil, the foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, said Sunday that his government would pursue United Nations measures “to impede abuses and protect the privacy” of international Internet communications to “guarantee cybersecurity that protects the rights of citizens.”

Mr. Patriota said that his government was taking action because of its “deep concern at the report that electronic and telephone communications of Brazilian citizens are being the object of espionage by organs of American intelligence.” For the same reason, he added, Brazil has also “asked for clarifications” from the American government.

The report on the American monitoring of Brazilian communications was published by O Globo, the main daily newspaper in Brazil, and said it was based on documents from Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive contractor for the National Security Agency. His disclosures have ruffled relations between the United States and an array of its allies and adversaries, including China, Russia, Europe and a widening swath of Latin America.

In a posting Sunday for the British newspaper The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, one of the writers of the O Globo article, said that “the NSA has for years systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunications network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the mail and telephone records of millions of Brazilians.”

Later Sunday, Brazilian news organizations began reporting that the country’s Federal Police and national communications authority would investigate to see if companies in Brazil cooperated.

American officials in Brazil declined to comment on the report. But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement saying that “we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

Any American interference in communications would be a delicate matter, even if Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff were not scheduled to make a state visit to the United States in October. The United States supported and aided the coup that brought the military to power in Brazil in 1964, beginning a 21-year dictatorship that routinely tapped the telephones and intercepted the mail of both Brazilians and foreigners thought to be in opposition to the government.