Brazil uses collaborative approach to track terror threats during Olympics
RIO DE JANEIRO — Above the food trucks and cruise ships stationed along Rio’s festive Olympic Boulevard, a quiet room is lined with desks that have a flag above each computer: Iran, Russia, China, United States, Oman. The police here watch a news memo board, a map with roving red squares that represent federal agents monitoring sports venues, and a live stream of Olympic judo.
Brazilian organizers say this control room is one of several such centers that represent a unique approach to collaboration to provide security for the 500,000 foreign guests during the August and September sports competitions here in Rio de Janeiro. The Games have so far gone off without any major hitch in security for visitors other than conventional crime and robberies, just like Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and 2013 Confederations Cup. Brazilian hosts say they have taken every measure necessary to prepare themselves for threats unknown.
The latest sign of local authorities' zeal for Games security came on Thursday as federal agents arrested two Brazilians and detained three for questioning in an ongoing investigation that targets suspected sympathizers with the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Brazilian authorities gave few details on the arrests, only saying that the goal was "to guarantee the security of the Olympic Games and citizens' well-being." In a similar series of arrests in July, a prosecutor confirmed that their tip came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"When you understand that an event like the Olympics is a global one, I think then it's the responsibility of everybody to support its security," said Valdecy Urquiza Junior, federal police commissioner and the head of Interpol Brazil.
What's unique about Rio's International Police Cooperation Center (IPCC), according to Urquiza, is actively sharing information rather than the host nation's police informing visiting agents once a day in briefings of occurrences in the area, as he said was the case in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Brazilian police opened this special control room for international law enforcement to work on its premises around the clock.
In addition to Rio's IPCC, which hosts representatives from 31 countries, a corollary center in Brasília pools intelligence data to monitor foreigners arriving in Brazil. Another in the capital city focuses on counter-terrorism, drawing on nine countries which Urquiza said have the best know-how in the field. A final collaboration unit set up on the tri-border area in Iguaçú Falls joins Argentine, Paraguayan and Brazilian police to monitor land crossings at Brazil's busiest border station during the Games.
"There is nothing that needed to be done that the Brazilian government didn't do related to this subject," Urquiza said. "Brazil rushed and approved anti-terror legislation. We set up specialized units for this activity. Our teams were trained both in Brazil and abroad. We established partnerships with police forces that best have a handle on this issue."
Those foreign police in Brazil for the Games are not armed with weapons — Urquiza said only a few dignitaries came accompanied by such security detail — but instead are armed with information, actively relaying intelligence from their countries' surveillance and law enforcement agencies to nerve centers here.
Rio's Olympics presented a curious cross of events for observers assessing the risk the host and its visitors faced for the kind of terror threats that have alarmed populations from Bangladesh to San Bernadino in recent months. Brazil has no history of terrorism committed by Islamic extremists. Its long-standing public security fears instead revolve around domestic issues, like lethal robberies and urban drug war violence.
But Games targets for extremists are plentiful: One-third of the countries participating in the Games are also members of the international coalition fighting the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Participants include France, Belgium and the United States, where so-called “lone-wolf” attacks have raised the concern about terror committed by an individual with merely online contact with organized terror groups, if any.
The Olympics have faced diverse attacks since Palestinian assailants killed 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Games in Munich. Attackers' ideologies are as varied as the teams that gather at the events. American bomber Eric Rudolph killed two people at the Atlanta Olympic park; he later said he did so out of opposition to legalized abortion. Italian anarchists attacked an Olympic merchandise store in 2006.
Urquiza said that stepped-up security with foreign partners has already led to actions on the ground: Agents in Brasília monitor the 80,000 passengers arriving in Brazil by air each day, and they identify one to two each day who need additional screening. Police identified at least one positive case amongst incomers and refused entry to a passenger who was wanted on financial crime charges in Qatar. Urquiza said that without the IPCC, Brazilian officials are only able to check entrants' backgrounds against Brazil's and Interpol's criminal databases, but that the center allows them to draw on data from other participating nations. That piece will go away after the IPCC shuts down after the Olympics, but Urquiza said they like the model so much they are trying to get 10 countries across North America, South America and Europe to continue the operation in the future.
Foreign expertise also comes handy in patrols, Urquiza said. He imagined a scenario in which a Brazilian officer saw a flag with Arabic writing at a venue. "I am not able to determine if that is a threat or somebody partying," he said. "But an Arab police officer is able to immediately identify this and reports it to us."
Nathan Thompson, a researcher with the Igarapé Institute, a think tank on public security based in Rio, said Brazilian officials' have shown they clearly welcome international collaboration on this front, a seeming recognition that Brazil, by the nature of the threats it faces, has little experience in counter-terrorism.
"I'd say that international cooperation at all levels is generally a good thing," Thompson said, "but I think the Brazilian public also has a right to know what form this cooperation will take in the future. But at the moment there is not a lot of transparency."
Thompson also added that the high level of involvement with the United States — Brazilian police have taken security courses with U.S. trainers and sent agents to observe events like the Super Bowl and Boston Marathon — is remarkable given the recent political history between the two over issues of surveillance and spying.
"All of this is in and of itself is notable given the fact that just three years ago Brazil was handling the fallout from the Snowden revelations," Thompson said. In 2013, President Dilma Rousseff took the rare decision to cancel a state dinner with President Obama after news reports of spying on her personal communications.
The clearest sign of that two-way street of intelligence sharing came two weeks before the Games when Brazilian law enforcement announced the arrest of 12 men on suspicion of plotting terror attacks. Brazil's justice minister described the group as "absolutely amateur" but said the suspects made "preparatory acts." The suspects have not been charged and are being held in a maximum-security prison deep in Brazil's hinterland.
The men, almost all Brazilian converts to Islam and two with Arab ancestry, would simply have been called by police for questioning and put under surveillance had it not been for the pressure of the Olympics, said Ronaldo Vaz de Oliveira, a São Paulo lawyer representing several of the detainees.
Oliveira said the men exchanged information and ideas about conflicting parties in Iraq and Syria online in ways they believed were protected by constitutional guarantees of freedom of expressions.
"They can even post a photo, they can do the propaganda that they wish, they can say they like it — they are still in the sphere of ideas," said Oliveira, adding that real threats of violence come from criminals that possess heavy weaponry and is harder for authorities to reign in than politicized social media users.
"In the meantime organized crime in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are in the sphere of action and reality. So that's my argument. You arrest thoughts but you don't arrest actions."
Contributing: Alan Gomez.
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