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The USG Open Source Center reports on Brazilian press reaction to President Dilma Roussef’s decision to cancel her state visit to Washington DC this fall, after revelations by Edward Snowden that the US National Security Agency not only intensively spied on all Brazilians online and engaged in industrial espionage but that special efforts were made to spy on the president herself.

Brazil is now the world’s 6th largest economy at $2 trillion a year, and its economy is bigger than that of Britain. Its middle class has doubled in size in the past decade. Brazil’s major trading partner is China, followed by the European Union and then the US (trade with the US in 2010 was $60 bn annually). China has more investments in Brazil than does the US.

Roussef intends to denounce massive US cyber espionage in her speech at the United Nations meeting later this month in New York. Most worrying, the Brazilian government appears determined to have all Brazilian email and web traffic stay inside the country on local servers, so as to avoid going through the NSA’s custody (the NSA put sniffers on fiber optic cables around the world to extract all data passing through them, including emails, web browsing and telephone calls).

The internet works because each node or connection point is equidistant from all other nodes or connection points. If national bottlenecks are created, it could destroy net neutrality and interfere with international searching and communication. By being greedy for big global data, the NSA may have killed the goose that lays the golden egg.

At the same time, knowledge of NSA tactics encourages other governments also to put their populations under intensive electronic surveillance. The US is the ultimate bad example.

The OSC report: