The New York Times published an op-ed on Thursday from Brazilian novelist Vanessa Barbara in which Barbara offered some facetious advice for those of her countrymen who were fed up with having their electronic communications going unread by the United States' National Security Agency, which was revealed in July to have monitored the emails, texts and phone calls of Brazilian citizens, government figures and corporations. Barbara calls her tactics "vaca louca", or the Mad Cow Retaliation Plan: in addition to greeting agents of the NSA in their personal emails, she advises that citizens send nonsensical emails packed with keywords designed to confuse their electronic surveillance programs. She's found one "upside" to the program, too: an important video clip lost months ago, she wrote, might have been "backed up" by the NSA. "Mr. Obama, if you're reading this," she says in the article, "please send me the file "summer2012.wmv" as soon as you can.)"
"It has become something of a joke among my friends in Brazil to, whenever you write a personal e-mail, include a few polite lines addressed to the agents of the N.S.A., wishing them a good day or a Happy Thanksgiving," wrote Barbara. "Sometimes I'll add a few extra explanations and footnotes about the contents of the message, summarizing it and clarifying some of the Portuguese words that could be difficult to translate."
She continued, "Other people have gone so far as to send nonsensical e-mails just to confuse N.S.A. agents. For example: first use some key words to attract their surveillance filters, like 'chemical brothers,' 'chocolate bombs' or 'stop holding my heart hostage, my emotions are like a blasting of fundamentalist explosion' (one of my personal favorites, inspired by an online sentence-generator designed to confound the N.S.A.)."
News of the NSA's surveillance program hit like a bomb in Brazil after it broke in July. Since then, the US has done its best to ameliorate Brazilian officials' anger, without much success. Last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff reprimanded Barack Obama in an explosive speech at the UN General Assembly in which she called the NSA's surveillance program illegal under international law and a breach of Brazilian sovereignty and called for the UN to establish a new global legal system to guarantee the neutrality of the Internet.
Glenn Greenwald, the O Globo/Guardian journalist who reported on the program based on files leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said yesterday in an interview with Argentina's Página 12 that he thought Brazil and Argentina should collaborate to create independent Internet infrastructure that would assure programs like that of the NSA could not be imitated. He is working on a report about "how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role on the US assassination program", according to CBS.
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