More than 10.000 people had their mobile phones checked during the tenure of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Among 10.000 people is "The enemies of Bolsonaro", a group of dissidents who have a public profile and who show their annoyance towards the former president and his policies. According to what the local Brazilian media have published, among those spied on are the singer Annita, the journalist William Bonner, the presenter Luciano Huck or several participants of 'realty' 'Big Brother'.
The Brazilian singer Anitta blocked President Jair Bolsonaro on Twitter, with an ironic comment about the colors of the Brazilian band that the artist wore in her show at the Coachella festival.
The cases took place between 2018 and 2020 and coincided with the period in which the then head of Receita intelligence, Ricardo Feitosa, accessed data from opponents of then-President Bolsonaro, including the prosecutor who was in charge of an investigation.
According to 'Folha de S. Paulo', the numbers of these taxpayers are on the list presented in April 2021 by the Federal Revenue Service to the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) in the framework of an investigation into unjustified inquiries for tax data.
The Brazilian Prosecutor's Office opened a preliminary investigation on Wednesday of the alleged irregular operations that the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) would have carried out the mandate of the former president against thousands of citizens who would have been spied on through their mobile phones.
The previous phase of the investigation has been launched one day after the newspaper 'O Globo' published that Abin, during the first three years of Bolsonaro's term, had fraudulently used a tracking system to locate a every person has gone through these mobile devices.
Without the need for any official order or protocol, this mechanism made it possible to follow the steps of up to 10.000 people every twelve months, it was enough to digitize the number of a telephone contact in the program and identify the last known location of the owner of the device on a map.
