The latest NSA leak: the NSA is spying on Brazil. Not its government, but its people - all of them:
the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians. The story follows an article in Der Spiegel last week, written by Laura Poitras and reporters from that paper, detailing the NSA's mass and indiscriminate collection of the electronic communications of millions of Germans. There are many more populations of non-adversarial countries which have been subjected to the same type of mass surveillance net by the NSA: indeed, the list of those which haven't been are shorter than those which have. The claim that any other nation is engaging in anything remotely approaching indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of this sort is baseless.
How do they do this? They "partner" with US telecommunications companies, who then partner with foreign telecos. So any business deal between a US phone company and your local provider may be cover for the NSA getting all your phone calls and email traffic. Somehow, I suspect a number of those deals are going to be terminated in the near future...
As for why the ordinary people of Brazil are intelligence targets, the whole point is that the US is now running a panopticon, in which they spy on everyone just in case. No individualised suspicion, no probably cause, no reason; if you exist, you're a target for the American Eye of Sauron.
And remember, the New Zealand government is supporting this, through its membership in the "Five Eyes" network. We should be terminating that alliance immediately. This sort of global totalitarianism is an anathema to New Zealand values, and we should not be supporting it.
