Over one million petition for Brazil to grant asylum to Snowden
Supporters of Edward Snowden have handed in to Brazil’s Foreign Ministry a petition signed by more than 1.1 million people calling upon the government of President Dilma Rousseff to grant the US National Security Agency whistle-blower asylum in the country. ● The petition, begun last November on the Avaaz web site, gathered support from throughout Brazil and around the world, providing a powerful expression of the immense popular support for Snowden and hostility to the global spying operations of the NSA. Revelations from the NSA documents made public by Snowden have had a particularly strong impact in Brazil, where they have established the US spy agency’s systematic hacking of the official and personal phone calls, text messages, emails and Internet searches of President Rousseff and her aides. They also uncovered economic espionage directed against Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, which is the fourth-largest energy conglomerate in the world, and the government’s ministry of mining and energy.