Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/15/brazilian-domestic-spies-use-t.html
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Brazilian domestic spies use Tinder to infiltrate protest movements
That’s not nice or sexy.
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Is it a normal thing for a (supposedly) democratic country to have domestic spies and police arresting people who would just attend to a peaceful protest against the government?
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not yet, but we’re working on it!
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We have a long history of doing that. There was even an assasination of one political leader back in the 1960s:
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We’ve already done it.
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just swipe left
are there countries without a domestic intelligence service? (honest question, out of the head I couldn’t name one example without some kind of secret police)
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I’m not arguing against domestic intelligence existence, but i don’t think it is constitutional to have them engaging into political disputes.
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Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
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Cf. FBI director James Comey.
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Boy, it’s like they looked at the British undercover relationship scandal and thought, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea!”
Well, since there are legit reasons to have one, I would imagine that only completely dysfunctional states with not much of a working government (Somalia?) or really small countries (Iceland? Monaco?) would be candidates for countries without such services. Although it may be with small countries that there’s no distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence - googling around, it seems like “Icelandic Defence Agency’s Intelligence Unit” serves a generic purpose. I just don’t imagine they have much call to go after Icelandic citizens.
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Nope, and it was downright creepy.
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That’s debatable. In a functional democracy, it could be argued that The State has no right to agenda of its own. So the intelligence is obtained directly by the domestic population running the country.
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As a matter of fact, this is somewhat old news as the protests were against Dilma’s impeachment. His approach was very tacky and a bit on the nose. He HAS contacted female friends of mine and he didn’t talk like a normal guy. He was very quick in saying that he liked the left and asking if they were going to the protests. It was a bad comedy “who’s a spy? Not me! I am true left member!” schtick. It was so tacky that people doubted he was a spy because the level of “something a parody right wing thinks a leftie is” was so high that it couldn’t be serious.
In the end that this guy was indeed military and made a totally misguided attempt to “catch communists” and ended up helping the PM jailing 20 extremely confused teenagers and twenty somes under the excuse of dangerous terrorists with bombs in the backpack was treated locally as ridiculous, misguided and pathetic. Him, personally, was treated as not only pathetic but creepy.
I like the fact that we have extremely dumb spies. We already have extremely dumb leaders. It fits.
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It’s standard spy procedure to get in through a back door.
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The dumb spies are the only ones we know about. It’s the smart ones who are truly insidious.
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They do not use the smart spy on political machinations. That is where the amateurs go to earn promotions, hence desperately trying to claim as many arrests as possible, only to see them thrown out of court.
So they fail in the smart spy category but win in the corrupt spy category (destined to be politically promoted).
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Um, if you’d ever been involved with activism in the US, you’d know that spies and agents provocateur are par for the course, even (or especially) when said activism is avowedly non-violent.
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