In 2009 Obama took over the presidency of the United States of America. If we didn’t have the memory of a fish and didn’t let the global press hammer the truth at us, we would remember Obama as the spy president. Against state espionage was a certain controversial lawyer associated with the racist far right: Glenn Greenwald. He often says that he is a defender of unrestricted freedom of expression and for this reason volunteered for a neoNazi organization. However, he also lobbied pro bono for the organization’s leader, who was convicted of ordering the judge’s murder. In 2005, Glenn Greenwald appeared in The New York Times as volunteer counsel for the organization’s leader and said he was innocent. Matt Hale (the leader) appeared to be a better known name to the public than activist attorney Glenn Greenwald. In the same year he began to live with Brazilian David Miranda. This is relevant because in the event of a dispute with the US, Brazil became her asylum as both eventually married. The STF legalized samesex marriage in 2011. Married to a Brazilian, Greenwald could not be extradited if he had more trouble with his home country’s government.
When did Glenn Greenwald, the Jewish activist and neoNazi advocate, become the journalist Glenn Greenwald, the defender of the Latin American left? It was with the wiretapping scandal exposed by WikiLeaks and amplified by The Guardian in June 2013. What was WikiLeaks?
Brief summary of WikiLeaks
You know the prefix “Wiki” from Wikipedia. It’s “free” in Hawaiian. “Leaks” is “Leaks” in English. The idea of Wikipedia was to function without an author, without central planning: only through voluntary contributions. It is a free platform for volunteers to write encyclopedia entries. WikiLeaks would work the same way: it was a platform for anonymous people to publish documents and for journalists to publish stories. The creator of this platform is Australian Julian Assange, who would also be its editor.
One fine day, Edward Snowden, who worked for the CIA and NSA, two US intelligence agencies, submits to WikiLeaks the government documents showing that the US had a global mass espionage program on Obama’s orders and that it even bugged heads of state worldwide . Snowden knew he would be relentlessly prosecuted by the government for committing a crime by releasing classified documents. In 2012, for example, he anonymously contacted a The Guardian journalist and a documentary filmmaker to ensure his leaks would be exploited by the mainstream media. From April 2012 to May 2013 he corresponded with them.
Before his leaks become history for good, he asks for a leave of absence to treat himself and flees the country. In May 2013 he met the journalist and documentary filmmaker in person; then you know you’re in trouble. Today he is a naturalized citizen of Russia. Assange, on the other hand, isn’t even a US citizen and had no reason to believe he committed a crime. He just created an impressive tool for journalists in 2006. Since 2010, however, he’s been relentlessly pursued for other leaks that of the then Bradley Manning, who became a woman in prison, changed her name to Chelsea Manning and has already attempted suicide twice. The material leaked by Manning was mountains of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for example, torture and humiliation in Abu Ghraib prison has been shown to persist, even after the Economist reported it in 2004. Western military tortured Arab civilians to extract confessions. Then they took pictures like this with impunity:
Brazil and Petrobras appear in the story
The Guardian journalist was none other than Glenn Greenwald. He had therefore had an idea of the content of the allegations since 2012. In June 2013, The Guardian began reporting on the Obama administration’s global surveillance program. Its ambitious purpose included the collaboration of secret systems of allied governments to monitor citizens. For most people, this would mean that your electronic correspondence can be reached by the US government, home of email and social networking services, and that your national governments willingly provide personal information about you to the CIA. In Obama’s words: “You can’t have 100% security and also 100% privacy. Nobody listens to your calls. We’re looking at the numbers and the duration of the calls,” but things got complicated by including more abusive practices — and even analogues — about heads of state and government officials.
Brazil will be released in September. On the first day, Fantástico shows in a partnership between Greenwald and Sonia Bridi that Dilma Rousseff was bugged by the USA. The following week, the 8th, Fantástico reported that the US government was spying on Petrobras.
This news about Brazil also appeared in the international press. Glenn Greenwald won a Pulitzer for his series of stories in The Guardian. In 2014 he created the vehicle The Intercept and continued investigating documents leaked by WikiLeaks.
All before Lava Jato
When we join Dilma Rousseff and Petrobras, it is inevitable that we think of Petrolão and Lava Jato. Lava Jato only launched in 2014 and caught the plots perpetrated at Petrobras during the interception. Could it be that anyone with access to NSA listening devices is unaware of the São Paulo Forum’s conspiracy to loot Petrobras and fund antiUS governments? Well, according to Greenwald and David Miranda, the NSA bugs began on December 14, 2010 and captured 29 Brazilian agencies including Palocci. According to Estado de Minas, “Greenwald recalls that the goals are mostly financial and economic. “It appears to be classic espionage designed to give the US an economic advantage over Brazil.”
At the same time as this scandal against the US erupted in June 2013 there were protests that marked an era and drew attention to Greenwald’s articles and sunk them into obscurity.
Who knows why, Obama has decided to coordinate the largest global and secret system of mass surveillance a matter of totalitarian dictatorship. This scheme caught the threads of the Foro de São Paulo. It’s reasonable to assume that Lava Jato started to know where to dig and what to find. To do this, however, it was necessary to change the law and count on the help of the STF which for some time has considered it constitutional to let investigated persons stew in prison until they are ready to report them, as in the case of Marcelo Odebrecht.
Without wiretapping devices, activist STF and powerful judges, the Foro de São Paulo would not have lost power. He lost it to actors other than the Brazilian right. And now the same actors are turning against the right now defended by Greenwald.