Peru’s Unhappy History with Surveillance, and How To Fix It
Peru’s Unhappy History with Surveillance, and How To Fix It
24, 2016 | By Kimberly Carlson
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In Peru, weak surveillance oversight brought down a prime minister. In 2015 the Peruvian magazine, Correo Semanal, alleged that Peru's National Intelligence Directorate (DINI) had illegally spied on journalists, businessmen, policy makers, politicians, and members of the military and their families. The DINI purportedly accessed information stored in Peru's national registry of properties.
The then Peruvian prime minister, Ana Jara, who was responsible for overseeing the DINI at the time, argued that the directorate was simply “copying information contained in public files and not violating tax secrecy or personal privacy.” Even so, Ms. Jara asked the Prosecutor's Office to investigate the situation for criminal wrongdoing and fired the agency's director, its' counter-intelligence chief, and its' national intelligence chief.
Congress felt the prime minister was to blame. Due to the political context at the time—for the upcoming presidential and congressional elections were only a year away—a Peruvian congressman argued that it was “obvious that the real goal [of the DINI's data collection] was to filter information to the press in order to 'eliminate' the ruling contenders [for the upcoming elections].” Then-President Ollanta Humala was left to select a new prime minister and cabinet after Ms. Jara was forced to step down.
President Humala did little to heed Congress's warning about unchecked surveillance of those in power. Just four months after Jara was ousted, the president enacted Legislative Decree Nº 1182, dubbed “Ley Stalker,” which forces telecommunications providers to retain communications data of their users for three years. Simply put, the decree shifted surveillance practices based on individualized suspicion to the mass, untargeted collection of communications of an entire population. Ley Stalker also allows warrantless access to location data in cases of blatant crimes.
More:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/perus-unhappy-history-surveillance-and-how-fix-it