Brazil to avoid NSA spying with cable to Europe

NEW YORK – In an attempt to avoid NSA spying, Brazil is planning to lay 3,500 miles of fiber-optic cable under the Atlantic Ocean to bypass the U.S. and create a direct Internet connection to Europe.

The estimated $185 million project, built without the help of U.S. companies, will stretch cable from Fortaleza, Brazil, to Portugal, Bloomberg News reported.

One year ago, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff delivered a scathing speech to the United Nations General Assembly accusing the NSA of violating international law.

"Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information – often of high economic and even strategic value – was at the center of espionage activity,” Rousseff told the world body. "Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the U.N. and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted."

In the cable project, Telecomunicacoes Brasilerias SA, known as Telebras, plans to shut out even Cisco Systems Inc., a U.S. supplier to Telebras known for its Internet prowess.

In a letter addressed to President Obama last May, John Chambers, Cisco’s chairman and CEO, referenced allegations the NSA had intercepted Internet technology equipment manufactured by Cisco to permit eavesdropping.

Chambers wrote, according to the Financial Times, "if these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to deliver products globally."

Calling on Obama to rein in the NSA, Chambers said Cisco does not cooperate with any government, including the U.S. government, to "weaken our products."

Recode.net reported NSA tactics hit Cisco’s third-quarter 2013 earning results in emerging markets like Russia, Brazil and China, with orders from Brazil falling 27 percent and from Russia 28 percent.

In October 2013, U.S. relations with Germany were rocked when the German magazine Der Spiegel reported the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone in a complicated electronic spying effort that may have involved using the U.S. Embassy in Berlin as a listening station.

Der Spiegel noted the NSA spying scandal first broken internationally by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had "reached a new level," threatening the trans-Atlantic partnership Obama had been trying to forge. The magazine reported a special unit of the CIA and NSA had used the roof of the U.S. Embassy to monitor cell-phone traffic of top German governmental officials.

Bloomberg further reported NSA spying could cost U.S. companies as much as $35 billion though 2016 because of doubts about the security of U.S.-manufactured information technology, according to a study conducted by the Washington-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a policy research group.