Brazil is sliding into techno-authoritarianism

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For many years, Latin America’s largest democracy was a leader on data governance. In 1995, it created the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, a multi-stakeholder body to help the country set principles for internet governance. In 2014, impelled by Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance by the US National Security Agency of countries including Brazil, Dilma Rousseff’s government pioneered the Marco Civil (Civil Framework), an internet “bill of rights” lauded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Four years later, Brazil’s congress passed a data protection law, the LGPD, closely modeled on Europe’s GDPR. 

Recently, though, the country has veered down a more authoritarian path. Even before the pandemic, Brazil had begun creating an extensive data-collection and surveillance infrastructure. In October 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree compelling all federal bodies to share most of the data they hold on Brazilian citizens, from health records to biometric information, and consolidate it in a vast master database, the Cadastro Base do Cidadão (Citizen’s Basic Register). With no debate or public consultation, the measure took many people by surprise.

In lowering barriers to the exchange of information, the government says, it hopes to increase the quality and consistency of data it holds. This could—according to the official line—improve public services, cut down on voter fraud, and reduce bureaucracy. In a country with some 210 million people, such a system could speed up the delivery of social welfare and tax benefits, and make public policies more efficient. 

But critics have warned that under Bolsonaro’s far-right leadership, this concentration of data will be used to abuse personal privacy and civil liberties. And the covid-19 pandemic appears to be accelerating the country’s slide toward a surveillance state. Despite briefly falling ill himself, and although Brazil’s death toll had passed 90,000 by the end of July, Bolsonaro has consistently downplayed the seriousness of the disease. Yet that hasn’t stopped him from using the crisis to justify even more aggressive data grabs.

The instinct to centralize

According to Rafael Zanatta, a director of Data Privacy Brasil, an NGO, the government’s discourse on using data to improve public services is strikingly similar to the way the military dictatorship in the 1970s justified its own efforts to create a unified system. That project, known as Renape, faced criticism from within the military and a backlash from the government technicians building it because of its lack of transparency and the threats it posed to freedom and privacy. It was eventually shelved.

The Cadastro may have been born of good intentions, says Ronaldo Lemos, a lawyer and director of the Institute for Technology and Society Rio. Indeed, the pandemic quickly revealed the need for some sort of nationwide digital identity

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By: Tate Ryan-Mosley
Title: Brazil is sliding into techno-authoritarianism
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/19/1007094/brazil-bolsonaro-data-privacy-cadastro-base/
Published Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2020 11:00:00 +0000

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