[akjj]

> It's a feel good.

There's a third possibility: It's being done for reasons that have nothing to do with the US or the NSA, say to reduce latency in Europe or support the telecommunications industry in Brazil, and the Rousseff only mentions the NSA in order to build the popularity of the project and herself.

[brudgers]

I 100% agree. There's an excellent business case for it and the NSA angle gives Brazil political cover for spending public money for the benefit of their wealthier citizens and international economic elites. My earlier comment was largely a reaction to the pandering to naive sentiments in the headline.

[atmosx]

I shared your feeling: Got excited but the headlines, but let's get more realistic here, they could just use encryption properly. Instead, NSA makes an excellent, I mean if he got us who know one thing or two, you can imagine how easy is to get to the rest using this facade.

[anigbrowl]

Yeah, it's a lot easier to justify the economic investment on something most people don't feel a direct benefit from by painting it as a response to a third party. I wish we'd use our occasional national freakouts about Chinese espionage to build a next-generation bandwidth infrastructure here in the US.