Brazil’s Rousseff lets Obama off the hook for NSA spying

BRASILIA, (Reuters) - President Dilma Rousseff said the Obama administration was not directly responsible for U.S. spying on Brazil and has taken steps toward smoothing over the diplomatic tensions set off by espionage disclosures last year.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour broadcast yesterday, Rousseff said she understood that the Obama administration needed time resolve what was happening and could not immediately provide explanations demanded by Brazil.

Documents leaked by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed that Rousseff’s personal phone calls and emails, and those of other Brazilians, had been spied on by secret U.S. eavesdropping programs used to monitor the Internet.

The revelations froze relations between Brazil and the United States. Outraged, Rousseff canceled a rare state visit to Washington and demanded an apology from President Barack Obama. The United States has publicly regretted the incident but has so far stopped short of issuing a formal apology.

“I do not believe the responsibility for the spying habits lay with the Obama administration. I think this was a process that began after Sept. 11,” Rousseff said on CNN, in reference to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that led the United States to tighten security measures and step up surveillance of the Internet to identify terrorist threats.