Security & Strategic Review - September 2013 (ISSN 1741-4202)

URUGUAY | Seeking defences against cyber-spying. Concern over cyber-spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in Uruguay began to spread when the local media picked up an ‘exclusive’ report published on 8 September in the Brazilian magazine IstoÉ which said that the NSA was running a station in Ascension Island from where it was monitoring telecommunication signals from Brasília, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Bogotá and Caracas. What caught the eye in Uruguay was the mention of Montevideo and the location of the ‘listening’ station: these targets had been mentioned already, in general terms, in the reports published by the Globo group in Brazil. Also, reports had been circulating since June-July about a ‘joint NSA-GCHQ [UK Government Communications Headquarters] facility’ on Ascension, and ‘an Anglo-American signals intelligence facility’ is listed by Wikipedia as one of the installations on that British overseas territory that lies in the Atlantic almost half-way between Brazil and Angola. IstoÉ says that it was from the Ascension station that Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff’s communications were intercepted by the NSA (see page Special Focus, 3-6).

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