For many years, Latin America’s largest democracy has been a leader in knowledge governance.In 1995, he established brazil’s Internet Steering Committee, a multi-party framework designed for the country to outline the principles of Internet governance.In 2014, prompted by Edward Snowden revelations about surveillance through the U.S. National Security Agency of countries that added Brazil, Dilma Rousseff’s government introduced the Civil Framework, a “declaration of rights” of the Internet acclaimed through Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.Four years later, the Brazilian Congress passed a knowledge coverage law, the LGPD, very inspired by the European GDPR.
Recently, however, the country has taken a more authoritarian path. Even before the pandemic, Brazil had begun to create a vast knowledge-gathering and surveillance infrastructure. In October 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree requiring all federal agencies to have a maximum percentage of the knowledge that Brazilian citizens have, from physical fitness records to biometric information, and to consolidate it into a vast base of central knowledge, the Cadastro Base do Cidado (Basic Register of Citizens). Without debate or public consultation, the measure is a lot.
This story component of our September 2020 edition
By reducing barriers to data exchange, the government says it hopes to improve the quality and coherence of its knowledge, which could, according to the official line, reduce voter fraud and bureaucracy.210 million people, such a formula can accelerate the provision of social and fiscal benefits and make public policies more effective.
But critics have warned that under Bolsonaro’s far-right leadership, this concentration of knowledge will be used to abuse privacy and civil liberties, and the covid-19 pandemic turns out to be accelerating the country’s shift to a state of vigilance.Bolsonaro has consistently minimized the severity of the disease, and the death toll in Brazil exceeded 90,000 until the end of July, but this did not prevent him from taking advantage of the crisis to justify an even more competitive knowledge entry.
According to Rafael Zanatta, director of Data Privacy Brasil, an NGO, the government’s communication of using knowledge in public facilities is strikingly similar to how the army dictatorship of the 1970s justified its own efforts to create a unified system.This project, known as Renape, has been criticized by the army and the reaction of government technicians who built it due to its lack of transparency and threats to freedom and privacy.
Possibly the cadastre would have been born of intelligent intentions, says Ronaldo Lemos, lawyer and director of the Rio Institute of Technology and Society.In fact, the pandemic temporarily revealed the need for some kind of virtual identity formula nationwide: through the end of April, 46 million casual workers, in the past invisible to the federal government, had registered online for emergency monetary assistance.
But Lemos, one of the authors of The Marco Civil, says its centralized nature is troubling.He has long advocated for a style similar to that used in Estonia, a country widely regarded as a style of virtual governance.wide variety of citizen knowledge, however, no government company has all the eggs in its institutional basket.Estonians will have to allow one company to access another company’s knowledge of them, and they can know who is looking for their knowledge.”With this decree,” Lemos says, “Brazil is doing the exact opposite.”
Under the October order, any federal company can begin applying for and gathering knowledge from others.Documents leaked to The Intercept in June revealed that ABIN, Brazil’s national intelligence firm, had already used the decree to request Serpro, a public knowledge company, Records of the 76 million Brazilian citizens with driver’s licenses.Such examples mean that citizens’ knowledge can begin to appear in many new knowledge sets without their knowledge.
The scope of knowledge acquisition under the order is broad.In addition to fundamental data such as name, marital prestige and employment, the cadastre will come with biometric knowledge such as facial profiles; explorations of the voice, iris and retina; footprints and palms; There are no limits to how knowledge of fitness can be shared, and the list even comes with genetic sequences.The plan, Lemos says, “uses genomics, faces and fingerprints to identify people seamlessly, without them knowing exactly how, which is pretty scary.
Centralizing so much knowledge poses a “huge security risk,” says Veranica Arroyo, political spouse of defense organization Access Now.Hacking or leaking can spread to citizens for identity theft, fraud or worse.In 2016, the city of Sao Paulo disclosed Non-public knowledge, adding some medical records, of 365,000 patients in the public fitness system. In 2018, the tax identification numbers and other data of approximately 120 million other people, more than part of the population, were disclosed on the Internet for weeks after the server hosting them has changed its name incorrectly.
The cadastre will be regulated through a central knowledge governance committee, a body composed of representatives of the federal government, which will take into account the sensitivity of knowledge and controversies, in stark contrast to the Internet Steering Committee established in 1995, whose members come with representatives of government, business, civil society and academia.”You don’t have citizens, you don’t have a technical community, you don’t have a civil society, it’s not even meant to be an independent commission,” says Danilo Doneda, a civil lawyer and adviser to the Internet Steering Committee.
Nor is it clear how the main knowledge base will be compatible with the LGPD, the new Data Protection Act.There are obvious inconsistencies, for example, biometric knowledge is considered delicate according to the PDMA, but in the new decree falls to a lower level.Protected category. The new decree “fundamentally ignores knowledge coverage legislation,” Doneda says.”The government acts like it’s not a problem.”
In fact, the fate of the LGPD is still pending; originally intended to enter into force in August, but its protections had already been diluted through Bolsonaro and Congress under its predecessor, Michel Temer.In April, however, the government opted for an extension to delay implementation until May 2021.
“All these efforts can lead to an asymmetry of strength between citizens and the state.”
There were probably smart reasons to postpone the LGPD, as disruptions caused through Covid-19 made it difficult for companies to adapt, but some suspect that the government’s real reason is to postpone the highest that the LGPD would bring to the political campaign.Municipal elections are expected later this year and electoral courts can use the new law to investigate political parties for data accumulation and misuse, according to Zanatta of Data Privacy Brazil.
There are many reasons to worry about such abuses: in the 2018 presidential election that brought Bolsonaro to power, WhatsApp has become a platform for widespread misinformation, favoring Bolsonaro to the fullest, according to an analysis by The Guardian.Advanced profiling, which aggregates knowledge collected during the pandemic, can only identify the maximum number of likely electorates and disseminate erroneous information, which can be accidentally used to disseminate it, Zanatta said.One of Bolsonaro’s sons is being investigated lately for allegedly organizing a criminal operation to spread false information.
The covid-19 pandemic has produced new evidence of the president’s goal of using knowledge as a power tool. In April, when the governor of Sao Paulo filed an assignment that uses telephone knowledge to track the extent to which others adhered to isolation measures.Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, called it an “invasion of rights,” and the president temporarily ended a similar plan of the Ministry of Science.However, it is said that he had no such scruples a week later when he signed a decree forcing telecommunications to transmit knowledge on 226.millions of Brazilians to IBGE, the government’s statistical agency, allegedly to investigate families on the pandemic.Critics said access to knowledge was unconstitutional and disproportionate, and was eventually overturned through the Supreme Court.
Like the smaller countries, Brazil is increasingly employing the generation to track down its citizens. Surveillance camera networks installed for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games remained in position after the occasions ended. Several police forces used this year’s facial popularity software to search crowds for and a series of expenses that allow and require widespread adoption of the generation – on public transport, for example – have gradually reached the Brazilian Congress.Last year, Brazilian police arrested 151 other people who had been known through facial popularity, adding a guy wanted for murder and dressed as woguy for the carnival.In December, facial popularity cameras were installed near the border with Paraguay, a hot spot for drug trafficking and another organized crime bureaucracy.
Crime is a major challenge in Brazil, where the homicide rate is about five times higher than the global average; a company’s position was the key to Bolsonaro’s rise; but the base of cadastro do Cidado and the generation of mass surveillance form a terrible combination, Arroyo warns: “All these efforts can lead to a strong asymmetry of strength between citizens and the state.”And concern about crime leads Brazilians to give up the confidentiality of their knowledge in exchange for security, Doneda says: “People are afraid.”
Deficiencies in facial popularity generation are well documented, namely the fact that existing systems, most of which developed in predominantly white countries, disproportionately identify other people of color.Human Rights Watch researcher César Muoz says this poses a specific challenge in Brazil, where more than part of the population is black or brunette.Almost some of these other people paint in the informal economy and about a third live below the poverty line.”If you’re a black user and have no way of finding a lawyer and you’re being held on the basis of facial popularity, it’s going to be hard,” Muoz says.
In theory, the regulations being created are reversible, but once the generation of surveillance and the masses of knowledge are in the hands of the authorities, it is difficult to recover them.”If the police buy the equipment, they’ll use it until it arrives it stops working,” Doneda says.
Compared to other parts of the world, Brazil is rich in NGOs committed to privacy and the rights to knowledge; It is also relatively easy to release collective actions, which facilitates the application of public pressure; and, as the pandemic has shown, the Supreme Court can still In early June, this forced the Ministry of Health to resume publishing full knowledge on deaths similar to Covid-19, after the ministry stopped doing so in what it was widely noted as an attempt to cover up the emerging death. Toll.
Lemos believes that a culture of knowledge coverage can still flourish in Brazil, in a similar progression to the paradigm shift that occurred after the arrival of a customer coverage code in 1990 and others began exercising their new rights.Much will depend on the entry into force of the LGPD and whether it is subsidized through a credible and recognized knowledge authority.