Brazil Says It’s Not Considering ‘Permanent Political Asylum’ For Snowden

The Brazilian government said on Tuesday that it was not considering offering "permanent political asylum" to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency intelligence analyst who took hundreds of thousands of classified documents from the agency and has been leaking them to reporters from exile in Russia. Their statement comes in response to Snowden's publication of an open letter in the Brazilian newspaper A Folha hinting that he would be happy to offer the nation's officials assistance with their investigations into NSA spying if he were to receive that asylum status.

Many of the NSA spying programs which Snowden's leaks have revealed, he wrote in the letter, "were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." Snowden added, "Many Brazilian senators agree, and have asked for my assistance with their investigations of suspected crimes against Brazilian citizens. I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so -- going so far as to force down the Presidential Plane of Evo Morales to prevent me from traveling to Latin America! Until a country grants permanent political asylum, the US government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak."

In response to the letter, the Brazilian Foreign Relations Ministry said it had not received an official petition for asylum from Snowden since he arrived in Moscow in June, according to La Jornada. The ministry added that without a formal request, it would not consider granting it to Snowden, whose hopes may have been buoyed by the vehemence with which Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has denounced the NSA's spying on her country's citizens, businesses, and officials. In a speech at the UN in September just before US President Barack Obama was to speak, Rousseff denounced the spying programs as, "a breach of international law and is an affront of the principles that must guide the relations among them" and called for the establishment of a new UN legal system to govern the Internet.

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