Vaza-Jato (the 7 terabyte hacking of Brazilian authorities), Glenn Greenwald and an Intriguing Coincidence.

Summary: This is an article originally written in Portuguese for Poder360 about Glenn Greenwald’s association and possible complicity with a gang of embezzlers and swindlers who hacked 7 terabyte-worth of private communications between the most powerful people in Brazil: supreme court judges, politicians, journalists, celebrities, businessmen. According to the prosecution files, about 1,000 people were hacked. But only a tiny fraction of those conversations were released by The Intercept — and only those that embarrassed the “unfriendlies”. Greenwald accused his colleagues at The Intercept of censorship, and yet he managed to do exactly that, and more: he used an infinite source of smut and embarrassment (7 terabytes) to destroy enemies and preserve friends, like the worst blackmailer would do. It is a statistical impossibility that among 7 terabytes of stolen conversations there would be nothing damaging to politicians deemed friendly by Greenwald and The Intercept, but that is exactly what the leaks (don’t) reveal. That was gatekeeping on a massive, criminal scale. This article will also discuss the following coincidence: it was right around the time when the criminals had an unusual amount of money deposited in their bank accounts, that Greenwald chose to delete 27k messages from his twitter, all in one go (and thus, most likely, deleted through keywords — i found some of the keywords he may have chosen as filter.) That was not a deletion done on a whim. Greenwald clearly felt obliged to do this, and the reason we know it is because just a while before his mega-deletion, Greenwald publicly condemned Matt Yglesias for evading “accountability” by deleting his own tweets. The worst thing about Greenwald is not that he may want the election of Trump, but that he is a hypocrite when he accuses his colleagues of partiality. The stolen material selectively leaked by The Intercept about his enemies in Brazilian politics is the clearest and most undeniable expression of selectivity, bias and partiality. It is the exact opposite of what honest journalism would be. Not a single journalist sympathetic to Greenwald was exposed — but his critics were. Not a single politician who defended The Intercept was exposed — but those who criticised it were exposed for things as small as an off-colour joke, and were publicly humiliated. Greenwald knew exactly who to preserve, or warn, and he announced on national television: “We won’t publish anything nor any conversation between supreme court judges, we’ve already said that.” Not coincidentally, one of the supreme court judges who were hacked announced right off the bat that Greenwald would be exempted from not only prosecution, but investigation. That’s right: a Brazilian supreme court judge whose hacked messages were given (sold?) to Greenwald announced that Greenwald had nothing to worry. The “verification” of those conversations were done with the help of journalists, who were allowed to visit The Intercept and compare the hacked messages in which they featured with their own phone phone records. It’s worth mentioning that no journalist outside The Intercept was allowed to copy any part of the hacked material, even their own private communications hacked in the operation. It’s worth mentioning as well that some of those journalists may have seen conversations they’d rather have kept private. In that likely case, they probably became instant supporters of Greenwald, for they too were now black-mailable. It’s no wonder I am virtually the only journalist who wrote about this in Brazil — and The Intercept never accepted my request to check the stolen material. I am an award-winning journalist, the only woman in the West to have interviewed Hassan Nasrallah, winner of a national radiojournalism award, youngest political columnist in two major national newspapers and yet The Intercept did not accept my participation in checking the stolen material, even though i would be subject to the same limit imposed on all who visited The Intercept newsroom to check the booty: no phone or any recordable device allowed in the room. It’s not surprising that most of the media in Brazil had no qualms, criticism or questions of Greenwald’s method — with the exception of journalists from O Antagonista, public critics of Greenwald and The Intercept from the moment it was launched in Brazil. Not coincidentally, those are the only journalists whose embarrassing conversations were exposed by The Intercept.

N.B. Quotes kept within asterisks, instead of quotation marks, have been translated twice: once from the original English into Portuguese, and now back to English. I should have looked up the original quotes, which were all compiled and kept in the two computers I used to write this story. Both of them were hacked and made useless. So, in order to spare myself the unbearable task of going through Greenwald’s stuff again, I will just keep these passages in asterisks because in the process of reversing translation I may have rendered them non-verbatim (while still faithful to, or even the same as, the original).

**When I sat down with him, my number one priority, above all, was to try to understand what his real motives were.**

Glenn Greenwald, March 2015

That phrase was said by Glenn Greenwald in March 2015, in a lecture to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about his first meeting with Edward Snowden, the subcontracted intelligence official who leaked millions of documents revealing American espionage of people and countries , private citizens and businesses.

Like that old Greenwald, I am also curious about the true motives of the criminals who hacked the private communications of hundreds of Brazilian authorities. According to the prosecutors of this case, at least 1,330 people have been attacked in this operation. The hacked material was given to Glenn Greenwald, who selectively published things that harmed his political enemies and spared those he sympathised with. To those who don’t know: Greenwald’s husband is a member of Congress for the self-proclaimed socialist party PSOL, and we know he spared comrades and politicians associated with Lula and Dilma because their names have been redacted. It’s worth noting that David Miranda, Greenwald’s husband, was never truly “elected” to Congress. He only took that seat because the man who had enough votes to get to Congress (Jean Wyllys) claims to have received enough death threats to make him flee the country. By resigning his seat, Wyllys relinquished it to the next candidate in the party ballot: David Miranda. Wyllys would later accuse Greenwald of using his money and power to “buy candidacies”. More on that later)]

Among the victims of this massive break-in are deputies, senators, judges, businessmen and journalists. Some of the victims are unknown to the public, and the way they are referred to or addressed (women nicknamed “whores”, for example) suggest the criminals who helped Greenwald were also targeting people they knew or had a relationship with.

Most of the targets in those 7 terabytes, however, were people whose public life could be destroyed by blackmail. In exchange for what? That we don’t know, but we do know those private messages could be used for coercion, something that a member of the gang made clear when he lamented in writing that the destruction of the stolen conversations would make the gang lose their “trump card.”

In the book I wrote about espionage for an English publisher, I explain how the underground world of espionage uses blackmail to “recruit” collaborators. The acronym MICE was created by intelligence services to explain the four most common reasons for transforming a citizen into a traitor: Money, Ideology, Coercion (blackmail) and Ego.

The most efficient of all, according to experts, is coercion. It is through blackmail that once independent people suddenly become slaves. The issue of privacy is so crucial to a healthy and free society that Greenwald himself raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling books and giving lectures defending that very right, as here, when he was chosen by Ted Talks to speak only and exclusively about this: Why Privacy Matters.

For people who may still think only those who commit crimes should be concerned with privacy, a basic exercise of imagination shows that we all have something we would like to hide from someone: a mother who tells her friend that she prefers one child over another; a husband who sends a message to a friend saying his sister-in-law is hot; a grandson who can no longer stand taking his grandparents to the mall; an employee who complains about the boss’s bad breath; an intimate photo; adultery; a dream. Greenwald explains this well in his participation in “The Munk Debate”, which ended up becoming a book.

**Imagine if you had to call an abortion clinic, or an HIV specialist, or an emergency room for suicide or drug addiction, or if you called repeatedly late at night someone who is not your spouse.**

For Greenwald, privacy is sacred, and should be accessed by few people, and only when the targets have been found guilty by the courts.

**It is legitimate to have punctual surveillance, focused on people who have been recognized by the court of law as really guilty of something wrong.**

In a debate with author Naomi Klein, Greenwald concedes there are risks to invasion of one’s privacy by hackers. “The dangers of having privacy eroded by the state certainly apply to having privacy eroded by these stateless actors who are hacking and publishing people’s private communications indiscriminately. That too kills privacy in a really profound way. And it’s hard to care about one but not the other.”

It is possible to glimpse, therefore, the extraordinary power of a gang of swindlers who had possession of 7 terabytes of communication from the most powerful and influential people in Brazil, from Jair Bolsonaro to the head of Congress David Alcolumbre, from Supreme Court judges like Gilmar Mendes to Alexandre de Moraes.

Worse yet, several of these targets were being monitored in real time as they sent messages and made political decisions. In some cases, the gang went even further and not only monitored live conversations, but got involved in them, falsely impersonating those they hacked. At one point, Walter Delgatti, the leader of the group, sends a message to Globo journalist Lauro Jardim as if the message had been sent by Congresswoman Joice Hasselmann.

“The government is already letting out that it considers the MPF [Attorney General’s office] as an enemy.”

It is worth asking here: what interest does a gang of fraudsters and embezzlers have in creating intrigue between the Attorney General and the president? How do these common criminals know the intricacies of Brazilian politics? Who would benefit from that false message? We don’t know who benefited, but we know who wrote the text: Luiz Molição, the hacker with whom Greenwald negotiated the leak of those 7 terabytes of conversations.

It must have been painful for fans of Greenwald to notice the distance between Snowden’s lofty goals and those of the Araraquara criminals. (Araraquara is the town where the gang leaders come from. They already had arrest warrants against them before they started the hacking operation.)

The gang’s motivation until then had been clearly financial. None of them seems to have any trace of ideological affinity, nobility of character or elevation of purpose. On the contrary, the criminals used to target unsuspecting random people, often the elderly, who were led to believe that Delgatti was the manager of their bank branch asking them to change their password: “It’s for your safety, ma’am,” Delgatti would say to any old lady who made the mistake of answering his call. Simple and gullible, these people lost their hard-earned money, which Delgatti proudly sported in pictures he posed with wads of hundred-dollar bills and guns. Here are some photos of the criminals, taken from the prosecutors’ files:

Delgatti was so well-known as a criminal that he had to use an accomplice to open a bank account on the accomplice’s name, as well as to rent a house and pay for electricity. This was necessary because since 2015 there was an arrest warrant against him. One of his partners handled R$ 893K in two bank accounts between August and December 2018. It was at that time, coincidentally, that Greenwald deleted in one go 27 thousand tweets from his public Twitter account.

It must not have been easy for Greenwald to make that decision — if not out of principle, at least out of shame — since just a month before he publicly humiliated journalist Matt Yglesias for doing exactly what he, Greenwald, would do a month later:

“That’s because you constantly and systematically delete your tweets like a coward so that you have no accountability for what you say,” he wrote on Twitter.

I went on a search for tweets that Greenwald wrote about the NSA, Snowden and Brazil. Greenwald had become a hero in Brazil when he showed the way the United States government had invaded phones of authorities, like Dilma, and of strategic public companies, like Petrobras.

My curiosity was piqued when I noticed that Greenwald started referring to Snowden’s leaks as “theft” shortly after the Vaza Jato publications [Vaza (leak) Jato is a play on Lava Jato (Car Wash), the judicial operation launched to indict and arrest Lula for corruption.] Until that moment, I don’t remember having ever seen Greenwald using that noun — theft — to describe what Snowden did, unless it was in quotes or in a sarcastic way.

To my surprise, however, of the hundreds of tweets written by Greenwald that I remember reading specifically about the NSA (National Security Agency) surveillance in Brazil, against Brazilian companies and authorities, there are only eight left. That’s right. Out of hundreds of tweets, only eight survived, and almost all of them before September 2018 were deleted (with the exception of two inconsequential tweets).

See here the search results in which the word NSA and any of the following words should appear: “Brazil”, “Brazil”, “brazilian”, “brazilians”, “brazilian”, “brazilians”, “brazilian”, “brazilian ”.

But how can I prove that tweets in which Greenwald spoke of the NSA and Brazil were deleted? Is easy. Just do the reverse search — tweets replying to Greenwald addressing the issue. Currently, almost all of them with those keywords in response to Greenwald are replying to deleted tweets: “This tweet is no longer available.” Doubt it? Check it yourself. Here is the result of one search that shows hundreds of tweets responding to something that Greenwald preferred to delete.

They will appear like this:

I found this coincidence very intriguing. When did Greenwald delete those tweets about the NSA and Brazil? Did they happen to be deleted along with the 27,000 deleted tweets around August 2018? If so, why at that time specifically? I am not going to go into the merits of what was revealed by Vaza Jato [it has its merits, because it showed, in the very least, a biased and incompetent judicial procedure, though apparently not a criminal one]. I am interested at the moment to know who is behind that mega hack, and which interests were decisive for the choice of what would and would not be disclosed by The Intercept.

I also want to know why a political party and a Supreme Court judge thought it best to consider Glenn Greenwald a person above suspicion, who should be exempted a priori from any investigation. [But I have an idea why. Here is an interview where Greenwald says that he will not be publishing any conversation between supreme court judges. Those guys may have sighed with relief hearing that.

https://twitter.com/schmittpaula/status/1172958511661232131 ]

We all know that condemning someone beforehand, without due legal process, is a tyrannical measure, typical of authoritarian governments. But exempting someone from being investigated for suspected involvement when a crime was clearly committed is just as authoritarian and arbitrary. No one should be above the law. There are several considerations to be made about the Vaza Jato hacking, and many are being solemnly ignored. This column, therefore, will continue next week — if I am not hacked, of course.