Among the report’s key facts: 1,584,547 phone lines were bugged in 2021, representing over 20 percent of Telefónica’s customers in Venezuela. Government entities also requested metadata of some 997,679 accounts, or 13 percent of users.
The report — which detailed wiretaps and internet censorship across the different countries where Telefónica operates — was released out of “our due diligence on human rights,” the company wrote.
Telefónica and Venezuelan government entities — including the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL), 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 newly released document provides a glimpse into the extent to which Venezuela’s government and intelligence forces have encroached into citizens’ lives and attempted to keep the country’s people in the dark, said Andrés Azpúrua, director of internet watchdog group VE sin Filtro. He and other experts warn the report portrays the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to Venezuela’s dwindling freedom of expression.
“The scope of the government’s intrusion is far larger than we ever imagined. It’s quite literally large-scale espionage,” Azpúrua said.
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.
Unlike other countries, interception requests in Venezuela bypass judicial orders and are instead made by CONATEL on behalf of the nation’s military, police and intelligence agencies, as well as the Experimental Security University, which trains police and security forces. The number of wiretapping solicitations they submitted to Telefónica mushroomed over time, nearly quadrupling from about 235,000 in 2017 to more than 861,000 in 2021.
Between 2016 and 2021, Telefónica denied 56,228 requests, according to the report.
The true extent of the government’s surveillance remains widely unknown — after all, Telefónica is only one of Venezuela’s telecommunications providers, said political analyst Nicmer Evans.
“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.”
In addition to wiretaps, the document outlines how Telefónica, through requests by the government, has increasingly censored internet content across Venezuela, blocking 30 URLs in 2021.
The report didn’t disclose which web addresses have been blocked. However, the watchdog group VE sin Filtro documented some 68 web domains that were off-limits to Venezuelan users in 2021, Azpúrua said — including 45 belonging to media outlets; eight to portals for political commentary; six to child pornography; four to multimedia sites, including those offering streaming services and SoundCloud; three to human-rights organizations; and two to websites dedicated to installing VPNs.
“It’s normal for a government to restrict access to websites connected with terrorism and that sort of thing,” Azpúrua said. “But when you have a government that blocks more media outlets than any other type of site, that’s when you see this is a terrible and unprecedented attack on free speech.”
Amid a barrage of threats against media outlets, an increasing number of journalists facing exile and waning resources for reporting, news deserts have become widespread in Venezuela. The outlets that remain face a “mountain of hurdles,” said Miguel Henrique Otero, president of El Nacional — one of Venezuela’s last remaining independent newspapers.
Since January, he said, El Nacional’s webpage has been blocked by Telefónica and other providers following former vice president Diosdado Cabello’s verbal threats on live television. The outlet had published a wire story about an investigation into Cabello’s alleged involvement in drug-trafficking organizations. Cabello is wanted by the U.S. Department of State and has a federal indictment on drug-related charges.
“[Cabello] announced that he was going to silence us on his program, and that’s exactly what happened,” Otero said. “Telefónica is being complicit in following up orders to violate human rights, without any justification or due process.”
El Nacional has lost 40 percent of its traffic from the blockade, he added. But the worst part, Otero said, is that there’s not much the outlet can do. Added to the woes is a crippling lawsuit from Cabello against the paper, which resulted in a hefty fine and El Nacional’s headquarters being seized by the government.
“The government already took our building. They block our content. I’m in exile,” he said. “The only thing that’s left is to continue throwing a tantrum, which is what I’ll continue to do.”
The volume of censorship and surveillance outlined in Telefónica’s report is compounded by Venezuela’s 2017 Law Against Hatred, which technically forbids the promotion of “fascism, hatred, and intolerance” but has been used to prosecute dissidents. Critics question how the government is using the vast amount of data at its reach, said Carlos F. Lusverti, a professor and researcher at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello’s Center for Human Rights in Venezuela.
“This aggravates the situation in terms of privacy but also in stigmatization campaigns and attacks against people,” Lusverti said. “These leaks expose, for example, victims of human rights violations because typical confidentiality spaces are violated, such as the confidentiality between lawyers and clients or between medical personnel and patients.”
In Venezuela, the specter of espionage has loomed so large that for years it has felt like a third person had eyes and ears on every message and every phone call.
As far as 2008, opposition groups have taken measures to attempt to evade surveillance. For instance, student activists, Azpúrua recalled, would huddle inside a room to plan an upcoming protest — telling each other the location but pinpointing a different one in their texts. Doing so, would buy them some time before state police forces would pour in to stop them, he said.
In a country where censorship has been a sort of open secret, the Telefónica report has left many Venezuelans with a “dystopian-like reassurance” that their long-held suspicions were not merely paranoia, Azpúrua said. While some are in disbelief, others are angered by the latest sign that the internet — a space that has grown so vast and free for the rest of the world — continuously shrinks for Venezuelans.
“And the worst part is that this report doesn’t even cover all of it,” Azpúrua said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg — and it’s scary to think about everything below what we can actually see.”
