Monday January 29, two armored federal police cars were discreetly parked in the early morning in front of Jair Bolsonaro’s vacation home in Mambucaba, a seaside town located 150 kilometers west of Rio Janeiro, where the former president of far right was staying with three of his sons.
Surprised by the cameras of the Globo television channel, the agents carried out a series of searches targeting the youngest of the family, Carlos Bolsonaro, currently municipal councilor of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Besides Mambucaba, police also searched his main home and his office at the municipal assembly. Two cell phones and a computer were seized.
The Federal Supreme Court suspects him of having been part of a clandestine espionage network which would have been set up within the intelligence services (ABIN) under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) to monitor hundreds of his political opponents using Israeli spyware FirstMile.
Acquired in 2017 under the government of Michel Temer (2016-2018), this digital tool makes it possible to geolocate people using their mobile phone number, by exploiting security vulnerabilities in the telecommunications network. It would thus have allowed intelligence services to bypass the judicial authorization normally required by law to monitor individuals using confidential data transmitted by telephone operators on their customers.
According to the Federal Supreme Court, Carlos Bolsonaro, who managed the communication of his father’s social networks during his presidency, would have used information illicitly collected by ABIN with the aim of creating false media campaigns against his political opponents. He would have them also used to prepare the defense of his brothers Jair Renan and Flavio Bolsonaro in the context of several corruption investigations.
Political “persecution”
The full list of people who were targeted by FirstMile has not yet been released. But, according to information made public by the Federal Supreme Court, among the victims of the software would be several of its judges, including Alexandre de Moraes, Rodrigo Maia, the former president of the Chamber of Deputies between 2016 and 2021, and Camilo Santana , former governor of the State of Ceara (2015-2022) and current Minister of Education under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Investigators also suspect that the software was used to monitor Simone Sibilio, the state prosecutor of Rio de Janeiro, who investigated, between 2018 and 2021, the assassination, on March 14, 2018, of Marielle Franco, councilor municipal of Rio de Janeiro.
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