The Brazilian federal police arrested two agents of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) this Friday in a broad operation in which the Number Three of the institution has been removed from office and searches have been carried out at the headquarters of the internal espionage service, in Brasilia. The reason is the suspicion that ABIN members spied without a court order on the mobile phones of politicians, lawyers, judges and journalists critical of then-resident Jair Bolsonaro. The tool used was a software of Israeli manufacture called FirstMile, different from the famous Pegasus used in several countries to spy on public adversaries, human rights activists or presidents and ministers.
The illegal use of the eavesdropping and geolocation system was revealed months ago by the newspaper Or Globeprompting the spy agency to open an internal investigation.
It has not been revealed who or how many people were supposedly spied on, but the aforementioned newspaper has reported that it was used 30,000 times illegally and, of those, on 1,800 occasions it was against adversaries of the far-right president. The police operation also includes searches in 25 locations spread across five states.
He software Called FirstMile, it serves to track the GPS data of any cell phone user through the data that the device transfers to communication towers. In Brazil, it is sold by the Israeli company Cognyte.
The Brazilian internal spy agency, ABIN, has reported that it purchased the eavesdropping program in 2018, when Michel Temer was president, and that it stopped using it in 2021, that is, when Bolsonaro still had more than a year left in his term. .
According to the Brazilian press, the software It was acquired during the military intervention of the public security of Rio de Janeiro with the argument of spying on organized crime. But the police have now discovered that the computer tool that allows access to mobile phones in addition to locating their physical location was made during the mandate of Bolsonaro, a retired far-right military officer.
The two detained ABIN agents are not accused of irregularly using the wiretapping system, reports Folha de S. Paulo, but to use their existence to blackmail the agency and prevent them from being fired as a result of a disciplinary file for another matter.
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