Published on Oct 28, 2013 by RuptlyTV
Journalist and campaigner Glenn Greenwald spoke on Monday in Rio de Janeiro about the latest revelations in the ongoing NSA spy operation scandal, confirming reports in the El Mundo newspaper that the intelligence agency may have tracked more than 60 million phone calls in Spain during a single month.
"The very clear objective of the NSA is not just to collect all this, but to keep it for as long as they can," said Greenwald. "So they can at any time target a particular citizen of Spain or anywhere else and learn what they've been doing, in terms of who they have been communicating with."
The revelations will continue to come, said Greenwald, and in many nations that have not yet been part of the story.
"There are a lot of countries, and journalists in a lot of different countries, who have been asking for stories and to work on documents for a long time," Greenwald said. "We're working as fast as we can to make sure that all of these documents get reported in every single country there are documents for, which is most countries in the world. What we've seen in Brazil and Germany and France and India and now in Spain, and of course in the United States, is going to repeat itself continuously for the next several weeks or months in almost every country around the world."
German Aranda, the El Mundo journalist who worked with Greenwald on the investigation, said that the crisis was far from over.
"I think that the French reaction to the last revelations was important to prepare the terrain in Spain. So it's the same for Portugal, when they see Spain is happening, they'll think about, well maybe it's happening with us too," he said. "With all the countries around Europe and around the world, it will be the same. The more countries see documents about them, the more interest the other countries will have to see what is happening with them."
The Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, is understood to have summoned the US ambassador to answer the allegations, which were unearthed in files passed on by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The news comes as a delegation of EU officials from the parliament's civil liberties committee prepares to visit Washington to discuss the crisis, which has included revelations that European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have had their communications intercepted.
