Snowden pens letter to Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP):

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden wrote in a lengthy "open letter to the people of Brazil" that he's been inspired by the global debate ignited by his release of thousands of National Security Agency (NSA) documents, and that the NSA's culture of indiscriminate global espionage "is collapsing".

In the letter, Snowden commended the Brazilian government for its strong stand against US spying.

He wrote that he'd be willing to help the South American nation investigate NSA spying on its soil, but could not fully participate in doing so without being granted political asylum, because the US "government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak".

Revelations about the NSA's spy programmes were first published in the Guardian and The Wash-ington Post newspapers in June, based on some of the thousands of documents Snowden handed over to the Brazil-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald and his reporting partner Laura Poitras, a US film- maker.

The documents revealed that Brazil is the top NSA target in Latin America, in spying that has included the monitoring of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's cell phone and hacking into the internal network of state-run oil company Petrobras.