Jair Bolsonaro's government used the system inappropriately to monitor people. Learn more about this case!
The monitoring system used improperly by employees of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) during the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) is capable of detecting an individual based on the location of cell phones using 2G, 3G and 4G networks.
To find the target, simply enter the contact's phone number into the program and track their location on a map. The servers that allegedly made irregular use of the tool were detained by the Federal Police (PF) on Friday morning (20). Developed by the Israeli company Cognyte, FirstMile is based on telecommunications towers installed in different regions to capture data from each device and return the cell phone owner's travel history.
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Espionage
According to the PF, the group under suspicion would have used intrusive software in the Abin system, in the critical Brazilian telephone infrastructure, to track cell phones several times. The crimes were allegedly committed under the government of Jair Bolsonaro. At the time, the agency was headed by Alexandre Ramagem, who is now a federal deputy for the PL party in Rio.
According to a report in the newspaper O Globo, during the first three years of the Bolsonaro government, Abin allegedly used, without any official protocol, the FirstMile tool to monitor the steps of around 10 thousand cell phone users each year. According to the Privacy Brazil Research Association, the tool works as a service geolocation of cell phones in real time, capable of decoding the logical identities of devices and generating alerts about the movement routine of targets.
For Data Privacy, the use of this service is incompatible with the Brazilian legal system. The developer company is known for systematic human rights violations from the perspective of the consequences of the use of its technologies.
On March 23 of this year, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office sent a request for information to Abin and the Israeli company Cognyte about the use of the real-time location system. The case also led to the opening of an investigation at the National Telecommunications Agency, Anatel. The contract, without bidding, for the use of the software began at the end of 2018, during the government of Michel Temer.
It was purchased for R$5.7 million, according to the MPF. In a statement, Abin said that the agency's General Inspectorate concluded, on February 23 of this year, an internal investigation to verify the regularity of the use of the geolocation system acquired by the agency in 2018, in December.
According to the agency, based on the conclusions of this investigation, an investigative inquiry was opened on March 21 of this year. According to the note, the tool stopped being used in May 2021.
Resignation
The federal government fired two Abin employees on Friday, who were arrested in the PF operation investigating the use of the tool to track cell phones without judicial authorization. The dismissals of Rodrigo Colli and Eduardo Arthir Izycki were published in an extra edition of the Official Gazette of the Union and were signed by the Chief of Staff, Rui Costa.
According to TV Globo and GloboNews, the two employees were arrested because they knew about the alleged scheme and coerced colleagues to avoid a possible dismissal.
