20/10/2023 – 14:48
The Federal Police (PF) identified that the FirstMile system, used by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin), carried out 33 thousand illegal monitoring during the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL). The employees who allegedly made irregular use of the tool were detained by the Federal Police (PF) this Friday morning, the 20th.
According to investigators, 1,800 uses of this program were intended to spy on politicians, journalists, lawyers, ministers of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and opponents of the former president’s government. The information is from the newspaper The globe. The list includes a namesake of STF minister Alexandre de Moraes – which, according to investigators, reinforces the suspicion that the minister was the target of the illegal scheme.
In order to leave no trace, the “Abin tracking gang”, as investigators have called the servers, deleted the vast majority of accesses from the computers, according to TV Globo.
The FirstMile system is capable of detecting an individual based on the location of devices that use 2G, 3G and 4G networks. To find the target, simply enter your telephone number into the program and follow the last position on a map. Developed by the Israeli company Cognyte (formerly Verint), the software is based on telecommunications towers installed in different regions to capture data from each telephone device and then return the cell phone owner’s travel history.
According to the PF, the group under suspicion had used “intrusive software in the critical Brazilian telephone infrastructure” – to track cell phones “repeatedly”. The crimes would have been committed under the former president’s government. At the time, the agency was commanded by Alexandre Ramagem, who is now a federal deputy for the Rio de Janeiro PL.
In a note after the operation, Abin says that the agency’s General Inspectorate concluded, on February 23, 2023, an Extraordinary Correction – an internal investigation – to verify the regularity of the use of a geolocation system acquired by the agency in December 2018 Based on the conclusions of this correction, an investigative inquiry was launched on March 21st. According to Abin, the tool stopped being used in May 2021.
“Since then, the information gathered in this internal investigation has been passed on by ABIN to the competent bodies, such as the Federal Police and the Federal Supreme Court. All requests from the Federal Police and the Federal Supreme Court were fully met by ABIN. The Agency has collaborated with the competent authorities since the beginning of the investigations. ABIN has been complying with court decisions, including those issued this Friday morning (20). The employees under investigation were removed on a precautionary basis,” he says in a note.
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