A man speaks by phone next to Telefónica’s tower in Barcelona on Jan. 30, 2013. Long-held suspicions of wiretapping by the Venezuelan government were substantiated last week, the Spanish parent company of Movistar, one of three major mobile telephone providers in Venezuela. According to the report, more than a million Venezuelan users have been surveilled in the past year.
Telefónica and Venezuelan government entities — including the National Commission of Telecommunications , the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, and the offices of the president and the attorney general — did not respond to several requests for comment from The Washington Post.
The company reported that it tapped the phone lines of far fewer customers in other countries — in fact, the phone line interceptions in a dozen nations where Telefónica operates accounted for less than 1 percent of its total users. Of the over 1.9 million accounts that Telefónica tapped across Latin America and Europe, 80 percent were Venezuelan.
“If we consider other Venezuelan state-owned providers, that number could well hover over 5 million people,” he said. “How can a state justify keeping tabs on that many people? This doesn’t hold any type of comparison with any other totalitarian system in the world. This is a prime example of the government abusing its power to exert control over the population.”
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