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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."
I'm sorry...you'll have to repeat that once more. I couldn't quite hear you over the sound of my brain cells committing suicide one by one.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Since this is becoming a global trend, I for one, DO NOT welcome our orwellian state overlords
Brazil has a past with its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_military_government so the gov wants to try and move away from the optics of a CIA backed counter-insurgency.
You also have a generation of young people who grew up in democratic Brazil with the internet and they still cling to the idea they have rights and freedoms.
In the old days technical help for the USA would ensure a few government-sponsored political assassinations and disappearances would find the trouble makers and solve any issues before they got any support.
Their intelligence agencies will be doing what any intelligence agencies do, make lists and wait for the political cover for targeted or mass arrests.
The last thing intelligence agencies want is a "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Popieuszko" ie some priest/press/student is beaten and murdered for the gov-
Suddenly the intelligence agents are in a very public court after just doing their 'jobs'.
Expect to see a lot of tear gas, spray, small tanks, rubber/live rounds at any protests but a long slow hidden harassment of protesters by every gov department.
Tax problems, university problems, press card is not valid, banking issues - just until a protest leader gets the message to stay home.
If that fails, active surveillance until the person does something wrong. Then a very legal night raid that the individual may or may not survive.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Monitoring and wiretapping aren't the same thing. I expect any decent state intelligence agency to have the ability to go on Twitter and read public tweets.
Didn't you know? We must destroy democracy and civil liberties in order to save them. One life saved is worth all our civil liberties. Our voters expect no less (and sadly, they really don't).
Why can't people learn from past mistakes? Do not under any circumstance let your city or country host one of these once every 4 year politically charged sporting events. They are way too expensive for the average citizen, and they're just a get rich quick scheme for a few and a way for politicians to make the naive feel good about them and re-elect them. These events funnel way too much money into building infrastructure that rarely gets used again after the event, and wrecks the local culture by taking away sponsorship money.
You're much better off getting on a regular championship circuit where you can invest in the infrastructure once and profit from it annually. And the championship circuits are much less politically charged, so the politicians don't gain much from meddling with the events.
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.
Silly question: do you actually know much about Brazilian politics and economics, or did you just use a sound bite statistic from one article to justify your generic ideological rant?
brazilian here:
The main problem, as far as I see, it's not the federal government: are the states and municipal ones.
The main riots begun against the price of the bus in the main cities (first in Porto Alegre in April, and took a big shape after Sao Paulo tried to raise the price of the bus ticket in may-june). People are beat by the local polices without clear reason (plus rubber bullets and moral gas) and lots of arrests are being made without a reason (in Sao Paulo the local police arrested hundreds of people with possession of VINEGAR*).
But look how crazy this sounds: the mayor of Sao Paulo (the city) is a left-wing (or center-left) workers party. The governor of Sao Paulo (the state) is a right-wing almost tea-party-look-a-like. The riots were against the mayor, but the state used its force (police). In porto alegre, the mayor is a center-right-wing and the state government is a left-wing workers party. The same: the riots were against the mayor, and the police (controled by the governor) was used in a brutal way (not so hard as sao paulo, but brutal) against the rioters.
Now that the main cities agreed to lower the price of the bus ticket (porto alegre in May and several other cities in the last few days), the riots looks more like french 68 riots than anything else. It's not about the price of the bus ticket anymore, but about the political and social culture in Brazil (corruption, a lack of social control, etc).
*Vinegar is used to decrease the effects of tear gas.
** One last thing: be careful with brazilian newspapers. Most of them will stand for its own agenda and they are part of the problem, not the solution.
stenvar says:
If you had done some proper research, you would have discovered that the "middle class" did not support the protest, it started off peacefully and only gained traction after abusive police crackdowns.
There's even a eyewitness report, together with pictures and videos of the police brutality by the poster "Canslli" here .
So while you sit safely at home smugly spinning lies to support your ideological war against the left, understand that there are real people with real issues who are bleeding and dying in the riots. At least respect that.
If you do not get what the problem is, see: Stop bankers betting on food - What is the problem?.
Also on Brazil: Currency War Rattles Brazil, Wakes Up the People:
The spark that lit it – after price and asset inflation had made life too expensive for the middle class – was an increase in bus fares.
[Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega] taken aim at the Fed’s “bold” efforts to hand trillions to the big players – the hot money – who didn’t invest it in production and jobs in the US but plowed it into every conceivable “asset class,” such as commodity and currency speculation and similar productive uses. It hit prices in Brazil and drove up the Real.
Brazil counterattacked last year. The Real plunged 24% against the buck. Prices of imported goods soared – adding to the inflation that had already been zigzagging up from 3.7% in 2007. In May, it hit a red-hot 6.45%.
It was just too much for the 40 million people who’d made the transition from poverty into (barely) the middle class since the turn of the millennium. Products they buy on a daily basis have jumped: tomatoes are up 96% over last year, onions 70%, rice 20%, chicken 23%. Since 2008, rents are up 118%.
Of course, bankers do what they like, own the politicians and sit on the board directly or indirectly of nearly ever major news source out there - so move along, no currency war to see here...
Look, there are two things that must be kept in mind about how things works in Brazil.
1. The police _really_ doesn't know better. They are ill trained and scared of riots. This means it is rather easy to start a major mess unless specific pressure against the use of rubber shots/tear gas is issued. That explains what happened in the first days.
2. We have quite a large amount of bandits that are just waiting for an opportunity to strike. And I don't mean the government (although the description fits all the *four* "powers" in Brazil just fine: press, judiciary, executive and legislative).
Yesterday, there were hundreds of thousands protesting in my city. It was peaceful, it was beatifull, and the police was prepared ahead of time to NOT go bonkers. After the main body of people went home, malcontents and bandits decided to start destroying public buildings in order to create a diversion. Their objective is only to destroy in order to create enough of a mess to be able to pillage stores. The bus fare was ALREADY reduced from R$ 3.30 to R$ 3.00 in the previous day, so there really wasn't much of a reason to protest[1]
The end result? People injured, lots of property destruction, and the city I live in is a major mess. The police was told to not shot the criminals dead just in case there were decent people caught in the middle. In Rio de Janeiro, it was MUCH worse yesterday.
It will get worse.
Doesn't everybody remember last year, when multiple reports came out from sociologists saying that food prices cause riots, and that food prices worldwide were expected to peak in the summer of 2013? Headlines like 'We have until August 2013 before riots sweep the globe', and 'We have one year before everything explodes' -- that doesn't ring a bell for anyone else?
Social unrest is correlated to the price of necessary commodities. When the poor cannot afford basic necessities, they have no choice but to get violent. Because of crop failures last year, this year is primed for social unrest EVERYWHERE.
The Arxiv paper demonstrating the correlation, based on data from the 2008 food riots.
An article warning us from last year. And another. And another.
Sociologists have known this was coming. Governments should have known this was coming. It's going to be a brutal, bloody summer. Get ready.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.