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Throughout the pandemic, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, downplayed the threat posed by COVID-19. In March 2020, he publicly stated that the virus’s effects were like that of “a minor cold” and asserted that he was not concerned about contracting it because of his “athletic physique”. A month later, Bolsonaro callously brushed off criticism from the press about Brazil’s spike in coronavirus deaths, answering: “So what’? My name is Messiah [a reference to his middle name], but I cannot work miracles.”
In the same month, April 2020, Brazil’s foreign affairs minister, Ernesto Araujo, published an article in Metapolitica, an anti-globalization blog, titled “Here comes the communist virus”. In it, he declared that “the coronavirus wakes us up again to the communist nightmare”, adding that, “the virus appears, in fact, as an immense opportunity to accelerate the globalist project. It was already being carried out through cli
By Mara Hvistendahl
The Intercept, February 22, 2020 Oracle documents tout how its software can be used to integrate social media activity with police data,
including in Chinam, February 22, 2021
HOW ORACLE SELLS REPRESSION IN CHINA
In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work.
POLICE IN CHINA’S Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter
A Chinese woman uses her phone next to a mobile police command bus in Beijing on May 4, 2020. Photo: Stephen Shaver/UPI/AlamyA Chinese woman uses her phone next to a mobile police command bus in Beijing on May 4, 2020. Photo: Stephen Shaver/UPI/Alamy
How Oracle Sells Repression in China
In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work.
February 18 2021, 11:20 a.m.
A Chinese woman uses her phone next to a mobile police command bus in Beijing on May 4, 2020. Photo: Stephen Shaver/UPI/AlamyA Chinese woman uses her phone next to a mobile police command bus in Beijing on May 4, 2020. Photo: Stephen Shaver/UPI/Alamy
“Organized crime groups are for-profit business enterprises,” Elvis Secco said. “To combat them, we have to defund them.”
Before being appointed to lead the organized crime division at Brazil’s Federal Police in 2019, Secco gained national recognition for dismantling a money-laundering unit of Brazil’s largest criminal organization, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC. While authorities were busy looking for drugs, the PCC had been actively laundering money in Londrina, Paraná, a prosperous town of 600,000, for 10 years, unbothered.
Now, Secco is attacking money laundering by criminal organizations at a national level, a strategy that isn’t frequently seen in Latin America. Other organizations, including the UN, are eager to draw lessons from his unit’s work.