A sign points out the National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md.RIO DE JANEIRO – The National Security Agency’s spying targeted the private computer networks of Google, a company that facilitates most of the world’s international bank transfers and Brazil’s state-run oil firm Petrobras, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a Brazilian TV report said Sunday night.
There were no details in Globo TV’s report about what information the NSA may have obtained.
All three companies are included in what the report said is an NSA training manual for new agents on how to target the private computer networks of big companies. They are Google, Petrobras was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, better known as SWIFT, the Belgium-based company that facilitates most international bank transfers in what are thought to be secure transactions.
Earlier reports based on Snowden’s documents revealed the existence of the NSA’s PRISM program that gives the agency comprehensive access to customer data from companies like Google and Facebook. Separate reports last week in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica, also based on Snowden’s leak, indicated the NSA and its British counterpart had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s computers by 2012, but the documents didn’t indicate how extensive the project was or what kind of data it could access.
Director of National Intelligence James Klapper said in a statement that “it is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.”