In what should be a rather embarrassing moment for Brazil, government heads admitted this week that its intelligence agency has done some spying of its own — on the United States, Russia, Iran and Iraq.
The admission is all the more interesting given Brazil’s loud expressions of outrage over claims that the United States conducted surveillance in the country. Brazil President Dilma Rousseff even cancelled a scheduled diplomatic trip to Washington, D.C., in anger at the revelations of the National Security Agency’s spy operations, The New York Post reported.
Brazil’s overseas intelligence operations were conducted about a decade ago and were tame in comparison to those of the NSA, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper reported, citing Brazilian spy documents it perused. Moreover, Brazil’s Institutional Security Cabinet said in an email to The Post that all its surveillance operations were in line with “Brazilian law for the protection of national interests … in strict observance of constitutional principles and the laws that guarantee individual rights.”
Ms. Rousseff alleged that the NSA program, on the other hand, was not because it randomly swept up billions of private citizens’ telephone calls — a blatant violation of individual privacies, The Post reported.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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