Fake WhatsApp chain has no relation to decree on Cybersecurity Council

“We must call for a fight against misinformation, after a chain of threats spread on WhatsApp threatening the coordinators and administrators of WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal groups, as if they were responsible for all the content that is broadcast within a group. And this chain was falsely created on July 31,” he warned.

This is how the conversation began with Luis Carlos Díaz, a Venezuelan journalist and cyber activist who is knowledgeable on the subject and who highlighted that the chain was replicated between August 21 and 22, incorporating some manipulated information about the creation of the National Cybersecurity Council.

“The purpose of these types of chains is to make people afraid. To make people terrified, to engage in self-censorship or to become the police of their own friends,” he said. He confirmed that the information is false since the decree published in the Official Gazette does not indicate that the National Cybersecurity Council has power over the content of chat groups, and one should not fall into the game of fear and self-censorship.

He explained that the National Cybersecurity Council, first of all, does not respond to a law that is still known, which has to do with a council that will be an advisor to the State on the issue of technological infrastructure and the security of that infrastructure, therefore, he added, it has nothing to do with what is said within a WhatsApp space, since they are private spaces protected by international freedom of expression legislation.

“So echoing this is playing into fear, into self-censorship, into veils and into an atmosphere that is not helpful,” he said. He said that it is understandable that there are fears, but that we must also be responsible and call for “being afraid of real and fair things, not of inflated campaigns to frighten people.”

He said that, at the right time, the National Cybersecurity Council – to the extent that it begins to speak – will say what its limits are and what it will be in charge of. “But taking something that has just appeared in the gazette and then starting to persecute or blame people, qualifies it as macabre. It is terrible and unfortunately it happens very often in Venezuela,” he commented.

The truth so far is that, in Official Gazette No. 42,939 of August 12, distributed by the Autonomous Service of the National Printing and Official Gazette (Saingo) on August 19, Decree No. 4,975 was published, dated August 12, by which “the National Cybersecurity Council is created, on a permanent basis, as an advisory and consultation body dependent on the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on the prevention of criminal uses of information and communication technologies, whose operation will be governed by the provisions of the decree.”