Rio de Janeiro and Toronto — The Globe and Mail
More disclosures about Canada’s aggressive foreign spying activities are coming, suggests Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist revealing the top-secret documents acquired by Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency employee and security contractor.
“There is a huge amount of stuff about Canada in these archives because Canada works so closely with the NSA,” Mr. Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, told The Globe and Mail in an interview on Monday.
While he said that he would not comment on documents not yet made public, he said that Canadians should know that “there is nothing really unique about what Canada’s doing to Brazil – it’s not like Brazil is the only target for Canada.”
On Sunday, Mr. Greenwald teamed with reporter Sonia Bridi from Brazil’s flagship investigative television program Fantastico to reveal documents suggesting that the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC), an ultrasecretive “electronic-eavesdropping agency,” set out to conduct a cyber-espionage campaign against Brazil’s mines and energy ministry.
Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff called the spying “unacceptable” on Twitter Monday. Saying the spying appeared to be a clear case of industrial espionage, she demanded an explanation from the Canadian government.
The leaked documents suggest that in 2012 CSEC used a spying program code-named Olympia to map the phone calls, e-mails and video conferences made within the mines and energy ministry.
Mr. Greenwald said that Brazil isn’t the only country that the Olympia program has targeted, according to the documents he has seen. He added that the ramifications spread far beyond Brazil.
“The reason this is so newsworthy is that the U.S. and its allies love to say the only reason they are doing this kind of mass surveillance is they want to stop terrorism and protect national security – but these documents make clear it is industrial and economic competition, it’s about mining resources and minerals,” Mr. Greenwald said.
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