“The Brazilian government had said it required a formal request from Snowden to grant asylum. Today, more than a million people have done what Snowden cannot and presented this request in his name,” Ricken Patel, director of an international campaigning group, said in a statement according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report.

With the request Snowden made of President Dilma Rousseff last December, he offered to assist Brazil in investigating the NSA’s surveillance operations in their country, The Hill reported.

In September, Rousseff postponed a state visit to Washington in response to the US spying on her communications with top aides, demanding a full public apology from President Barack Obama.

Brazil is also home to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who reported the NSA leaker’s first document.

In July, Greenwald co-wrote articles for O Globo, in which he claimed that some of the documents leaked by Snowden indicated that Brazil was the NSA’s largest target in Latin America.

Greenwald wrote that the NSA was collecting its data through an undefined association between US and Brazilian telecommunications companies, but he could not verify that Brazilian companies had been involved.

Following the revelations, the Brazilian government ordered an investigation into telecommunications companies to determine whether they illegally shared data with the NSA.

NTJ/HH