I’m currently working on what I believe are several significant new NSAstories, to be published imminently here, as well as one very consequential story about NSA spying in Brazil that will first be broadcast Sunday night on the Brazilian television program Fantastico (because the report has worldwide implications, far beyond Brazil, it will be translated into English and then quickly published on the internet). Until then, I’m posting below the video of the 30-minute interview I did yesterday on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about our NSA encryption story and ongoing US/UK attacks on press freedom (the transcript of that interview is here).
There has been some excellent commentary on the implications of the NSA/GCHQ encryption story we published this week. The LA Times’ Jim Healey says the story is “the most frightening” yet, and explains why he thinks that. The Bloomberg technology columnist David Meyer’s analysisof what this all means is worth reading in its entirety. In the Guardian, security expert Bruce Schneier, who has worked with us on a couple of soon-to-be-published stories, identifies 5 ways to maintain the privacy of your internet communications notwithstanding the efforts of the NSA and GCHQ to induce companies to build vulnerabilities into certain types of encryption.
As for Brazil, the fallout continues from our report last week on Fantastico revealing the NSA’s very personal and specific surveillance targeting of Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff and then-leading-candidate (now Mexican president) Enrique Peña Nieto (the NSA documents we published about those activities are here). In an interview this week with The Hindu’s Shobhan Saxena, Brazil’s highly popular ex-president Lula vehemently condemned NSA spying abuses and said Obama should “personally apologize to the world”. The New York Times’ Simon Romero has a good article from yesterday on the thus-far-unsuccessful attempts by Obama to placate the anger in the region from this report. As for the new report coming Sunday night in Brazil, please take note of this adamant statement last week from the NSA, as reported by the Washington Post [asterisks in original]:
