The National Council of Justice (CNJ) informed to the Clandestine Telephone-Tapping CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry Committee) that 12,210 telephones are being currently monitored with judicial authorization. According to the phone companies, last year’s monthly average was 30 thousand interceptions, all of them authorized by Justice.

Nevertheless, for the CPI’s president, Deputy Marcelo Itagiba (PMDB-RJ), the data offered by Justice don’t match the ones informed by the telephone companies. He will submit a requirement that the phone companies forward to the CPI data about 2008.

More careful criteria for the authorization of taps
Marcelo Itagiba believes that the committee’s task is to force Judiciary to be more careful when authorizing taps. "The CPI is reaching its objective, since it wanted to limit the excesses and absurd decisions made by some judges”, he affirmed.

Itagiba criticized again Supreme Court for denying access to injunctions, which would allow a better understanding of the data supplied by the operators.

409 thousand taps authorized in 2007
Solely in 2007, 409 thousand telephone taps were made, responding to judicial requirements. The information was given to the CPI in March 2008, by representatives of the fixed and mobile telephone operators, Oi, TIM, Brasil Telecom, Telefônica, Vivo and Claro. For the Deputy Marcelo Itagiba, the data confirmed the suspicion that the taps were used in an indiscriminate way, and became the rule, and not the exception.

CPI’s rapporteur, Deputy Nelson Pellegrino (PT-BA), considers that a country with so many intercepted calls cannot guarantee the right to privacy: “in the last three or four years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of legal taps; this is preoccupying, since I defend that the State has mechanisms to protect society", he affirmed at the occasion.

Report - Alexandre Pôrto, Karla Alessandra e Paula Bittar// Rádio Câmara
Editing – Rejane Xavier