The Universality of Spying

In Medium, I write about how spying is actually pretty universal — especially in Brazil, which has suddenly (& inexplicably) developed an aversion to it.

Rousseff claims the U.S. spying operation is so severe, it constitutes a violation of Brazil’s sovereignty. But really, why the uproar? At a certain level, the revelations are like realizing there is gambling at Rick’s — if it weren’t, one would really wonder why the U.S. intelligence community wasn’t actively spying on other governments, especially those with enormous organized crime and drug issues that happen to sit along primary transatlantic fiber optic cables.

Brazil, for example, operates its own massive domestic spying operation — a detail Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, leaves out of all of his outraged writing about the NSA. In 2008, ABIN, Brazil’s intelligence agency, secretly recorded a conversation between Supreme Court president Gilmar Mendes and Sen. Demóstenes Torres. The president at the time, Lula da Silva, suspended the agency’s chief spy, but no one knows how long or how often senior officials were wiretapped.

More on over at Medium.