However, speaking broadly about recent company actions, he recognized that “now, security has become a top concern.” Telebras president Caio Bonilha told Reuters the main factor in the decision was cost and not concerns that a U.S.-made satellite could be more susceptible to U.S. and Japanese companies raised eyebrows among some diplomats in Brasilia who wondered if the NSA disclosures were to blame. The choice of Thales over a consortium of U.S. The bidding was decided by Visiona, a new venture set up by state-led telecom company Telebras and Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer to operate the new satellite and build future ones. Within weeks, it picked Thales Alenia Space, a consortium led by Europe’s largest defense electronics company, France’s Thales, to build a satellite that will be shared by Brazil’s government and armed forces. The first wave of spying disclosures in July included documents showing the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency jointly ran satellite monitoring stations in 64 countries, including one based in a residential neighborhood of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.Ĭoincidence or not, Brazil has made key decisions in recent weeks to gain more independence in the skies above. “When we started investing in Expresso six years ago, they said: ‘Why bother developing a new tool if Gmail exists and is free?’.” CONTROLLING THE SKIES “Now people understand the risk you run of not protecting your communications,” said Melo. government has said it monitors the patterns of communications in order to detect potential threats to security, but it does not snoop on ordinary people.īureaucrats working in Brasilia’s modernistic government buildings have had encrypted email services, including a local platform known as “Expresso,” available to them for years.īut it wasn’t until the recent disclosures that many officials realized their value, said Marcos Melo, a manager at Serpro, the state-run communications company that created Expresso and provides the government with secure databases. That followed a report in July that the NSA had used secret surveillance programs to spy on emails and collect data on telephone calls in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Rousseff was so angered by the news that she may cancel a planned state visit to the White House next month, an official told Reuters on Wednesday. A report by Globo TV on Sunday displayed a document with a diagram showing communications between President Dilma Rousseff and her top aides, which it said was part of an NSA “case study” on its own powers of espionage. More than most other countries, it has been embarrassed by documents leaked by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Nonetheless, Brazil is particularly motivated to act. That is, building new technology is expensive and difficult, and even then there is no guarantee of fully dodging the sophisticated dragnet employed by the U.S. The growing emphasis on secure communications has been a somewhat tough sell in a famously relaxed country that has no history of international terrorism and hasn’t gone to war with any of its neighbors in more than a century.īrazilian officials also admit they face the same problems as many other countries upset by the recent NSA disclosures. National Security Agency? Brazil is going to try.Īngered by recent revelations that the United States spied on its emails and phone calls and even its president, Brazil’s government is speeding up efforts to improve the security of its communications - and hopefully keep more of its secrets under wraps.īy purchasing a new satellite, pushing bureaucrats in Brasilia to use secure email platforms and even building its own fiber-optic cable to communicate with governments in neighboring countries, Brazil hopes to at least reduce the amount of information available to foreign spies. BRASILIA, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Can any government escape the prying eyes of the U.S.
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