Photo: Sonny Abesamis
State intelligence gathering on the internet and social media: the case of Colombia
Lucía Camacho, Daniel Ospina Celis, Juan Carlos Upegui Mejía | January 26, 2024
In this report, we explore this subject by drawing on the “Secret Dossiers” case published in 2020 by Semana magazine, which shows how the Colombian state exploits social media and the internet in order to monitor and profile individuals.
In this report, we explore this subject by drawing on the “Secret Dossiers” case published in 2020 by Semana magazine, which shows how the Colombian state exploits social media and the internet in order to monitor and profile individuals.
Our analysis warns that the safeguards present in existing legislation are rather sparse and that intelligence agencies’ desire to self-regulate on the issue of open source intelligence is almost nonexistent despite these agencies’ surprising clarity about the data on the internet and the social media that interest them.
We believe that, in the discussion on desirable limits, the insights that have emerged regarding the passive monitoring of the electromagnetic spectrum and the interception of communications offer valuable lessons for better addressing the impact of online intelligence.
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