South Americas largest country by landmass and economy is also a flashpoint for criminal organizations, narcotics trafficking, and terrorism financing.

Brazil once provided vital intelligence to prevent transnational threats from reaching the U.S. homeland. Then, Edward Snowden published a trove of classified information in 2013, revealing wiretaps of then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Intelligence cooperation and military partnerships with Brazil broke down, and the United States lost a key partner.

But a renewed security partnership under a new Brazilian president is one of U.S. Southern Commands chief priorities, its leader, Adm. Craig Faller, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview.

We get our best intelligence from our very capable partners, Faller said on a Zoom call from Southcom headquarters in Miami.

With a narcotics fight in full force across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and gaping intelligence holes in places such as Venezuela, protecting the homeland requires partners and trust, he explained.

Intelligence is foundational to anything we do, any decision I make, Faller said.

Former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and 33-year CIA veteran David Shedd said the relationship with Brazil is vital in the hemisphere.

In Brazil, it's very important for us to have an intelligence relationship with them because of the tri-border area, Shedd, now a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, told the Washington Examiner.

The porous border region of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay is a center point of money laundering, false documents, terrorism financing, and other illicit activities.

Even 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed is known to have spent time there.

None of these things stay within their borders. They become transnational organized crime, Shedd said.

The damage done by Edward Snowden is enormous, he added. So, when Dilma did not want the exercises or the visits, and then the intel sharing, that tone came from the top.

Rebuilding a relationship with a partner country is a whole of government effort, but the security interests are coordinated in large part by military to military cooperation. Southcom has the lead for the countries of the Caribbean, as well as those in Central and South America.

This is a focus of United States Southern Command with any country, with Brazil as one of our key partners, said Faller, who noted that a Brazilian two-star general will be joining Southern Command as a liaison, putting Brazil on par with Americas closest partner in the region, Colombia.

We have tangibly thickened our intelligence sharing processes and procedures and actually our understanding, and we benefit greatly from that, Faller said.

A military president

Former army captain and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is known for inflammatory statements, his kinship with President Trump, and his controversial pro-military stance. That has included speaking positively about Brazils 1964-1985 military dictatorship, a time when freedom of speech was stifled and democracy advocates disappeared.

While Brazil is now one of the most vibrant democracies in the region, strengthening ties under Bolsonaro is delicate, Faller explained.

I stay out of the noise, he said.

We focus on strengthening our partnership, whether it's intel sharing, whether it's the ability to exercise together, planning, we stay out of policy and politics, he said. Their officers, just like ours, they swear an oath, and they're swearing their oath to the constitution.

Shedd, who dined with Bolsonaro during his 2019 visit to Washington, said the Brazilian president is eager to strengthen ties to the U.S. at all levels, and that benefits people in the U.S.

He had just a really big vision of putting Brazil on the path to a strategic partnership with the United States, he explained, describing economic, military, and judicial cooperation.

In the military area, he very much wanted to see a reversal of the agenda with [former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva] first and then Dilma afterwards (which, of course, was rife with corruption) and really rebuild that relationship, he said.

Bolsonaros visit to Southcom in March, the first by a Brazilian president, while it later caused a scare when his press chief tested positive for the coronavirus, served as a sign of the rising military relationship with the South American giant.

Strengthening partnerships with countries that Faller refers to as neighbors compensates where resources fall short of U.S. Central Command, which manages the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which counters China's influence in the Pacific.

Russia made more port visits to Latin America in 2019 than it had in decades, Faller said, while China has ramped up its gifts of military equipment, including trucks and small boats, to countries in the region.

We just don't have a lot of assets down there to see what they're doing, Faller said of the great power rivals. So, a lot of this is we pick up bits and pieces and pull together.

Shedd said in a country such as Venezuela, where the U.S. no longer has a diplomatic presence, relationships with neighboring nations fill intelligence gaps.

Presence matters, he said. And when you don't have it, we do it by a proxy with friends and allies.

Shedd explained, Colombia, Brazil may be running sources inside Venezuela. They have a presence in Venezuela that we may not have.

Faller used a sports analogy to make the case for continued regional engagement and strengthening partnerships to counter great power influence and regional security threats.

Our partners want to do that with us. We just have to be there, he said. I never was in a sporting game yet that I won by not being on the field.

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EXCLUSIVE: Southern Command rebuilds intelligence relationship with Brazil years after Snowden damage - Washington Examiner

Back at the 2012 Emmys, Homeland started a two-season winning streak with eight awards and then lost all 19 of its nominations in its next five. After a powerful eighth final season, the Showtime drama series is poised to finish strong. Back in the fray is two-time Best Actress winner Claire Danes, who has taken bipolar CIA spy Carrie Mathison through a tumultuous trajectory as she ricocheted around her mentor, intelligence operative Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin).

Making this complicated woman believable is not as easy as Danes makes it look. Mathisons a superagent operating in a naturalistic world that is grounded in real reporting. Every year, during their Homeland hiatus, Danes and Patinkin joined executive producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon and director Lesli Linka Glatter for a weeklong Washington, D.C. spy camp. Over eight seasons, they developed relationships with intelligence experts, think-tank heads on the right and left, and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors who filled them in on whats going on in the government and the world. Memorably, the Homeland team interviewed players such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and whistleblower Edward Snowden (via closed-circuit TV in Moscow). Thats how the Homeland writers learned what was keeping intelligence professionals up at night, and that formed the basis of each season.

Over eight seasons, Danes is front and center, carrying us on adventures that could seem far-fetched if she didnt make us believe them. Early on, Danes established Mathisons athletic and intellectual prowess as well as her unwavering commitment to guarding the national interest. The CIA agent starts out falling in love with the man shes charged with debriefing, Marine Corps Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), after he is released by al-Qaeda after eight years as a prisoner of war. Their tempestuous affair yields a daughter before Brody is abruptly killed.

Over the series, the writers kept throwing Mathison into charged moral territory, like refusing to look after her child. Still, its conditional, said Danes from upstate New York where she was in lockdown with her husband Hugh Dancy and their two young sons. You can only forgive Carrie for abandoning Franny if she never makes that mistake again. She cant go off and have another child, for example, but that idea came up. You just cant make that choice. Its all proportionate, and relative. So she can transgress and she can falter, in profound ways. If she learned from those mistakes, then we can forgive her. She does absorb her losses and her missteps.

As far as Danes is concerned, Mathison is kind of a James Bond. Shes like a superhero. You know she shouldnt exist. She doesnt exist, shes so exaggerated. Shes suffers a lot, shes not having the kind of great time Bond is having. She does, despite all of the pain, take deep joy from her work. Shes professional. Shes always the smartest person in the room, ultimately the most trustworthy, even though she is volatile.

Mathison moves on to loving Brody replacement Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) as well as using other men for sex and/or information, while always staying anchored to Berenson. Her priority remains the same: saving the world, no matter the cost. But her psyche absorbs the collateral damage she racks up along the way. Mathison is vulnerable (and dangerous) when her meds fail, and tortured by abandoning her daughter, but nothing is more satisfying than watching her grab a head scarf and a motorcycle and hit the ground in Kabul.

This season, she chases down vital intel, even when the local CIA considers her unreliable and gets in her way, forcing her to get assistance from Yevgeny Gromov (Costa Ronin), the respectful Russian spy who clapped her in prison. Even though they are on opposing teams, they are equally matched and believe in the same things.

Erica Parise / Showtime

One of the most challenging scenes in the finale was the sexiest. When Mathison tracks down the flight recorder from the late presidents helicopter crash, Yevgeny catches her, said Danes. She has to make an impossible pitch to him, and in her Hail Mary, starts offering him sex, finally. Oh my God! He injects her with a needle. Its all so preposterous! As we were filming, Im rolling my eyes. You know this is never going to be remotely plausible. Thats ridiculous! It works, youre with her.

Thats the tightrope Danes had to walk on the show. The quality of the writing is so consistently wonderful, she said. Even when the scenarios were extreme and challenging, there was always cogency there. It was always thought through in the writers room and ultimately on the page. It was charted out. But it was fun to be able to take such big swings, to do something that was just so much.

The only way through was finding ways to make it also feel possible, she said. That was the trick. Somehow we were able to figure that out. We got more facile with it as we went along, we all found our rhythms. Her scenes with Patinkin were literally so musical. He was sonorous, reflective, sturdy and careful. She was the opposite. He was an oboe and she was this frenetic flute. We played with the musicality off the words and ideas. She was manic sometimes, I got to accentuate and lean further into that.

Alert: Season 8 spoilers ahead.

Danes felt the challenge of winding up the series. Its an impossible task really, she said. But we came as close as we could. Did we try! We were not casual about it. At the end of Season 7, when Berenson maneuvers to get Mathison back, her mind is so far gone that she doesnt recognize him. Once she is recovered, he sends her back to Kabul. But is it too early? This final mission pits spy and boss against each other in a fraught moral duel as she demands that he give up a Russian asset he has been working with for decades. He refuses to betray a loyal source; she insists that the price must be paid for the greater good. Is Mathison capable of destroying her beloved Saul? And yet, the twisty plot winds up in a satisfying switch where she winds up replacing the Russian asset herself.

The actress saw the parallels between Brody and Mathison in the first and last season. Its kind of poetic she finds herself in this position, she said. But theyre both taken to the edge of their moral integrity and their patriotism, and they both ultimately do the right thing, in the same way that Brody doesnt blow himself and everyone else up, but he comes very close. But Carrie and Brody are driven by the same motivating principle throughout: they are patriots. Brody became a perverse version of that, and the same is true of Carrie.

And yet there are lines that Mathison cannot cross. You know we like to thrill, said Danes. But we also had to protect her heroism, right? We have to be frustrated by her, in real tension about whether shes going to do the right thing or not. But you know she cant kill Saul, we would not be able to forgive her that. We were always probing those ideas and playing with how far we could stretch the dramatic circumstances.

Erica Parise / Showtime

Working with writers is the best part of the process for Danes. Its an alive back and forth, she said. You really do work in tandem, like in the theatre, youre establishing a new play with the writer in rehearsals. And you tweak things as you go along, tailored to the performers. With television, you become this one organism, you interpret their work, and then they interpret yours, and its like kneading bread, it goes on for so long. It got to the point where it was really clear which writer had written which episode because you get to know each writer so intimately.

The actors could continue interacting with the writer responsible for each episode on set, to guide the director and actors if they ever had any questions, said Danes, who missed writer Meredith Stiehm when she left after two seasons, the only woman writer on the show. She was the person who established the bipolar aspect of Carries character. She had some personal history in her family.

Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME

Saying goodbye

During the final season, after closing each location, from Morocco to Alabama, the cast and crew said a series of farewells. There was not one cumulative climactic goodbye, but a few, said Danes. There wasnt ever going to be a moment of epiphany when the clouds parted and I wept. Its weird to have it be released into the world and truly, conclusively, unequivocally end, during the pandemic.

Shes trying to process saying goodbye to the show that dragged us all over the planet, she said. Its been such a big, bold, ambitious, active, adventure, and now were all burrowed into our little dens, the exact opposite. We were pining for home, so looking forward to returning to a normal life, whatever that meant. But I wasnt thinking of this!

Up next: Danes is discussing various television and film projects in the abstract I dont know when anything will happen. Clearly, TV remains the more fertile environment for female characters than film, she said. Id love to make a movie again, its tough, especially right now in the corona era when people are not going to theaters and films are being streamed almost immediately to TV. Thats going to become that much more true. You always want to do something different. I wont be playing a bipolar CIA agent anytime soon. Yeah, Id like to play somebody who is maybe not saving the world literally every day? But she was just such a good time. I will miss her, deeply, shell always be in there, shell always be kicking around. Maybe I can bring her out to play in my own living room.

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With Homeland in the Rearview, Claire Danes Explains Why Carrie Could Not Kill Saul - IndieWire

Special thanks to legal intern Rachel Sommers, who was the lead author of this post.

Visa applicants to the United States are required to disclose personal information including their work, travel, and family histories. And as of May 2019, they are required to register their social media accounts with the U.S. government. According to the State Department, approximately 14.7 million people will be affected by this new policy each year.

EFF recently filed an amicus brief in Doc Society v. Pompeo, a case challenging this Registration Requirement under the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in the case, two U.S.-based documentary film organizations that regularly collaborate with non-U.S. filmmakers and other international partners, argue that the Registration Requirement violates the expressive and associational rights of both their non-U.S.-based and U.S.-based members and partners. After the government filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, we filed our brief in district court in support of the plaintiffs opposition to dismissal.

In our brief, we argue that the Registration Requirement invades privacy and chills free speech and association of both visa applicants and those in their social networks, including U.S. persons, despite the fact that the policy targets only publicly available information. This is amplified by the staggering number of social media users affected and the vast amounts of personal information they publicly shareboth intentionally and unintentionallyon their social media accounts.

Social media profiles paint alarmingly detailed pictures of their users personal lives. By monitoring applicants social media profiles, the government can obtain information that it otherwise would not have access to through the visa application process. For example, visa applicants are not required to disclose their political views. However, applicants might choose to post their beliefs on their social media profiles. Those seeking to conceal such information might still be exposed by comments and tags made by other users. And due to the complex interactions of social media networks, studies have shown that personal information about users such as sexual orientation can reliably be inferred even when the user doesnt expressly share that information. Although consular officers might be instructed to ignore this information, it is not unreasonable to fear that it might influence their decisions anyway.

Just as other users online activity can reveal information about visa applicants, so too can visa applicants online activity reveal information about other users, including U.S. persons. For example, if a visa applicant tags another user in a political rant or posts photographs of themselves and the other user at a political rally, government officials might correctly infer that the other user shares the applicants political beliefs. In fact, one study demonstrated that it is possible to accurately predict personal information about those who do not use any form of social media based solely on personal information and contact lists shared by those who do. The governments surveillance of visa applicants social media profiles thus facilitates the surveillance of millionsif not billionsmore people.

Because social media users have privacy interests in their public social media profiles, government surveillance of digital content risks chilling free speech. If visa applicants know that the government can glean vast amounts of personal information about them from their profilesor that their anonymous or pseudonymous accounts can be linked to their real-world identitiesthey will be inclined to engage in self-censorship. Many will likely curtail or alter their behavior onlineor even disengage from social media altogether. Importantly, because of the interconnected nature of social media, these chilling effects extend to those in visa applicants social networks, including U.S. persons.

Studies confirm these chilling effects. Citizen Lab found that 62 percent of survey respondents would be less likely to speak or write about certain topics online if they knew that the government was engaged in online surveillance. A Pew Research Center survey found that 34 percent of its survey respondents who were aware of the online surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden had taken at least one step to shield their information from the government, including using social media less often, uninstalling certain apps, and avoiding the use of certain terms in their digital communications.

One might be tempted to argue that concerned applicants can simply set their accounts to private. Some users choose to share their personal informationincluding their names, locations, photographs, relationships, interests, and opinionswith the public writ large. But others do so unintentionally. Given the difficulties associated with navigating privacy settings within and across platforms and the fact that privacy settings often change without warning, there is good reason to believe that many users publicly share more personal information than they think they do. Moreover, some applicants might fear that setting their accounts to private will negatively impact their applications. Othersespecially those using social media anonymously or pseudonymouslymight be loath to maximize their privacy settings because they use their platforms with the specific intention of reaching large audiences.

These chilling effects are further strengthened by the broad scope of the Registration Requirement, which allows the government to continue surveilling applicants social media profiles once the application process is over. Personal information obtained from those profiles can also be collected and stored in government databases for decades. And that information can be shared with other domestic and foreign governmental entities, as well as current and prospective employers and other third parties. It is no wonder, then, that social media users might severely limit or change the way they use social media.

Secrecy should not be a prerequisite for privacyand the review and collection by the government of personal information that is clearly outside the scope of the visa application process creates unwarranted chilling effects on both visa applicants and their social media associates, including U.S. persons. We hope that the D.C. district court denies the governments motion to dismiss the case and ultimately strikes down the Registration Requirement as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

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EFF to Court: Social Media Users Have Privacy and Free Speech Interests in Their Public Information - EFF