Brazilian Government To Monitor Social Media To Counter Recent Riots

First time accepted submitter prxp writes "Recent riots in Brazil have taken the Brazilian Government completely by surprise, since most of its intelligence personnel have been assigned to work on the security of Fifa's Confederations Cup, according to 'O Estado de São Paulo' (Google translation), one of Brazil's major newspapers. This is particularly ironic, since protesting against the way Fifa has managed Confederations Cup in Brazil accompanied with overspending by the Brazilian Government is in the heart of these riots. Because of that, ABIN (the Brazilian equivalent to CIA) "has assembled a last minute operation to monitor the Internet" where intelligence officials have been tasked to monitor protesters' every move 'though Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp' in order to "anticipate itineraries and size of riots" among other intel. The legality of such action is unknown, since Brazilian laws prohibit this kind of wiretapping."

Comments

just some background

[stenvar]

I think the causes and the protesters are interesting:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/19/us-brazil-protests-impact-analysis-idUSBRE95I1LQ20130619

That is, the protests are a noisy sign of discontent among a swath of the population that is on average richer and better educated than average Brazilians. A survey of demonstrators in Sao Paulo on Monday by polling firm Datafolha indicated they were three times more likely to have a university degree than the rest of the population.

Causes:

Just a quarter of demonstrators told Datafolha they were protesting against politicians - behind bus fares (56 percent), corruption (40 percent) and police repression (31 percent).

So, it's educated middle class people in the city protesting that politicians aren't giving them stuff cheaper and that politicians are wasting their money. Remember that Brazil is under a left-wing government headed by the PT (Worker's Party). At least it's not Venezuela, where the left wing government managed to produce a shortage of toilet paper; you really don't want to have riots involving large numbers of people lacking toilet paper; it's likely to be smelly.

Of course, if Brazil had a free market kind of government, some people would be protesting against that as well because they think they aren't getting their "fair share". They'd want a left wing government that gives them "free stuff", until that left wing government predictably fails to be able to deliver, and then they protest against that. Well, as long as the stay away from fascist or theocratic government and don't run out of toilet paper, the Brazilians should still be mostly OK.