Argentina's spy agency wins back power under Macri as officials increase surveillance.
A little over a year since Argentina's spy agency was shackled in the wake of the mysterious death of a star prosecutor, President Mauricio Macri is backing its quest for broader powers that critics fear will revive unfettered domestic spying.
Argentina's spies are pressing Macri to remove restrictions imposed by former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after public investigator Alberto Nisman was found dead in his home in January 2015, a source in the judiciary said.
Fernández de Kirchner accused a rogue agent (Antonio "Jaime" Stiusso, whom she had fired a month earlier) of playing a role in Nisman's possible murder. The incident came days after the outgoing head of INTERPOL, Ronald Noble, disproved the centerpiece of Nisman's accusation that she attempted to cover up Iran's alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
Fernández overhauled the country's spy agency in response, branding it the Federal Intelligence Service, or AFI. But despite the new name, the agency is starting to look more like the former Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) - with agents purged by Fernández de Kirchner moving back into old posts since Macri took power in December, according to an intelligence source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Macri then issued a decree in May that lifted controls Fernández de Kirchner had placed on the spy agency's funding, allowing it once again to spend most of its budget without any oversight.
Macri's administration has since floated the possibility of giving back to AFI control of wiretaps that have been run by the judiciary since last year - raising red flags with Argentines fearful of a return to its sinister role in the country's past.
The old SIDE spy agency helped the military dictatorship that ruled between 1976 and 1983 to target dissidents in the country's "dirty war," when thousands disappeared. Successive democratically elected governments were widely believed to keep using it to snoop on opponents.
"I'm worried" about AFI regaining wiretapping powers, said Juan Rodríguez, the director of the court-controlled department DCC that now conducts legal taps of some 3,000 phone lines in Argentina. Since Fernández de Kirchner's reforms, wiretaps must be authorized by a judge and registered for possible scrutiny. Standing before DCC's 17 wiretapping devices, Rodríguez said: "this is transparent ... we want to end the dark period that this system once represented."
Macri has not said why he lifted oversight rules on AFI's budget; but critics point to corruption cases in recent decades that have been traced to the spy agency, which was assigned a $100 million budget for 2016.
Both the Macri administration and its main ally, right-wing Governor María Eugenia Vidal of Buenos Aires Province (the nation's largest), have come under fire in recent days for revelations that millions in taxpayer funds are used to fund pro-Macri "troll centers" and "social media analysts" that monitor social media activity by teachers and other public sector employees unhappy with Macri over sharp cutbacks and layoffs.
At: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-argentina-spying-idUKKCN1002K7
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