Tower Pacheco, in Spain, has been the scene of clashes between the far right and immigrants. Portuguese police are attentive – including any replication attempts in Portugal
Public Security Police (PSP) ensures that they are following the events in Torre Pacheco and highlights that it has “ability to respond in terms of prompt means to match the needs of our community and population, given more disruptive events.”
“Public Security Police follow all the criminological phenomena that take place in our country, always accompanying, with preventive interest, all international criminal phenomena,” says security officials.
The PSP also points out that “it is part of several international institutional groups of police information exchange” and that through these tools maintain permanent contacts with security forces in various parts of the globe.
Also, but also with a preventive purpose, PSP is an integral part of the internal security system, idealized precisely to “track all types of phenomena that can compromise or endanger security and public order.”
The PSP points out that what “most importantly clarifies” to the Portuguese population is that “PSP pregnantly fulfills its mission, preventively, promoting useful actions to guarantee security and public order”.
The PSP also says that “in terms of response, it has the means to match the needs of our community and population in the face of more disruptive events.”
How to watch in Portugal
What is going on in Torre Pacheco “no risk to Portugal”, begins first of all by ensuring Hugo Casteira, former president of the Internal Security Observatory. The also cybersecurity expert believes that the likelihood of some kind of replication phenomenon on Portuguese soil is very low – or even null – because “the Portuguese, in social terms, are not as extreme as in Spain or other countries in Europe, where the situation is clearly worrying.”
“The great phenomenon at this level we have in Portugal – and that can really spoil such a situation – is always ‘the worst of football cheerleaders,'” he says, saying that in Portugal “this type of incidents have not happened.” “I think it’s not worrying and I don’t see the way it happens in Portugal this way, unless there are really aggressions of sexual charities and someone else, before the police arrive, can take it to your chest and do some justice,” he theorizes.
Most of the incidents in Torre Pacheco were enhanced on social networks. But how can the authorities monitor – not normal social networks, but encrypted apps at two points, ie in the sender and receiver – such as Telegram, Signal or WhatsApp? Hugo Costeira recalls that he is one of the areas in which he has more years of experience and, despite demonstrating a wider and fuller response, recalls that “he would be giving technical inputs that are important to those who monitor social networks, but are also important for those who are monitored.” Still, the cybersecurity expert ensures that “nowadays there are tools in the world of security forces and information services that can perfectly detect all kinds of speech, identify profiles and identify those responsible for these profiles, enter the groups and extract all kinds of information and somewhere else.”
“The question is not all states have financial capacity, often to acquire a particular type of software,” and we are no longer talking about software like Pegasus – which became famous after an investigation by a journalist consortium exposed that the tool had over 50,000 mobile phones as potential targets – explains Hugo Casteira. Now “we are already talking about even more advanced and useful tools than this and that can really be used on social networks to detect and prevent a number of phenomena, from radicalization to criminal or terrorist acts.”
The former president of the Internal Security Observatory ensures that this monitoring nowadays “is not difficult to do,” first because now “there are a thousand programs” and second because “the advance of artificial intelligence” has streamlined data processing capacity. And how is Portugal in relation to the rest of Europe in this field? “We walked in half, but closer to Europe’s tail.”
