In the election campaign, presidential candidates fought over “centenary secrets.” On the one hand, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) says that he will “issue a decree” to stop restricting access to information related to the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL). The president, on the other hand, urged him to issue his decree, which has a certain amount of secrecy.

Find out how these privacy restrictions work and what you can do to lift them.

President Jair Bolsonaro speaks exclusively for NDTV – Photo: reproduction/NDTV

What are “centenary signs”?

There is no decree on 100 years of secrecy, emphasizes Carlos Affonso Sousa, lawyer and director of the ITS (Institute of Technology and Society). “There is an administrative decision to deny access to a public document because it contains personal information,” he adds.

This is established through the LAI (Access to Information Act). Enacted on November 18, 2011 by then-President Dilma Rousseff (PT), the law guarantees the basic right of access to information, “with the preservation of secrecy as an exception.”

Section 31 of the law establishes a maximum period of one century for information considered personal.

A survey conducted by Ficam Sabendo for AFP of all requests for information already denied under the Access to Information Act since 2015 (since the data became available) shows that some cases fell under “one hundred years of secrecy”. » during the government.

There are, for example, the president’s vaccination card, his tests for covid-19 and medical prescriptions for the treatment of the disease, the visits of the first lady Michelle Bolsonaro to the Alvorada Palace and the scandalous case with documents about the participation of the general. Eduardo Paswello in action with a representative.

– How does this restriction of access to information occur?

The centenary period is evaluated at the administrative level by the server, which decides whether to characterize certain information as personal in accordance with Article 31, after a request for access to information, which can be made by any citizen to public authorities.

“When a government denies access to a document for a hundred years, it does so not because the information is important to the security of the state, but because it understands that it is private and that there is no public interest in it,” says Souza.

However, Rafael Zanatta, lawyer and director of research at Associação Data Privacy Brasil, recalls that the law was created to “protect citizens from abuse by the state, and not to protect political representatives or those who hold positions and functions in the public interest.” .

“Can sigils less than a hundred years old be revoked?”

Classification of secrecy or restrictions on access to information may be revised by the new president, comment Zanatta and Renato Toledo, lawyer and public law candidate at USP (University of São Paulo).

To do this, if elected, the leader of the PT would need to “reconsider some of the conventions, such as whether medical information about the president (or civil servants in general in senior positions) is publicly available,” explains Luis Fernando Toledo, co-founder of Ficam Knowing and Research at the Columbian Brown Institute. university.

The two lawyers agree that the decree could be one way to make a difference. However, Zanatta recalls the existence of an outdated legal system for classifying information. In that sense, he said, the president could prepare a new bill to reform the LAI by “addressing more structural issues” such as not specifying a period of less than 100 years for secrecy to apply to personal information.