A 31-year-old hacker, the man who changed the face of Operation Lava Jato

His name is Walter Delgatti, he is 31, they call him “Vermelho” (the colorado) and it is the hacker who leaked the private chat between the prosecutors and the judge at the time in which they are plotting to condemn former president Luiz Incio Lula da Silva in Operation Lava Jato.

The revelation changed the political climate in the country to such an extent that He has already been compared to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or to the American spy now in Russia Edward Snowden..

“For me this boy is an important person in the history of Brazil. He will be our Snowden, our Assange”, declared recently the former president Dilma Rousseff, precisely her, victim of espionage by the National Security Agency (NSA, for its acronym in English).) from the United States, where Snowden worked.

According to this spy revealed, the NSA leaked into their iPad and into Petrobras systems during the administration of Barack Obama, whose vice president and current president, Joe Biden, had to travel to Brasilia to apologize.

The “ boy ” Rousseff talks about is a student from Abogaca who lives in Araraquara, inside the state of São Paulo, by chance the only city that was completely locked down for ten days because you collapsed its health system with the Amazon coronavirus.

Delgatti has been detained since 2019 -he was held in Brasilia prison for six months and now serves at home- for hacking the Telegram app and leaking millions of conversation files of public figures, including the family of President Jair Bolsonaro.

He even hacked Bruna Marquezine, the actress who was footballer Neymar’s girlfriend, and said she didn’t want to reveal her intimacies.

“I always believed that the information Lava Jato had was of public interest, I never disclosed anything that was in the private sphere of people.”“

Walter Delgatti

“I always thought that the information that Lava Jato had was of public interest, I never disclosed anything that comes from the private sphere of people”, he maintained in an interview with the Brasil portal 247.

The truth is that Delgatti voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 and always admired Deltan Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor of Operation Lava Jato, the operation that ceased, they condemned Lula and, with that, prevented him from run for president that year.

Former employee of cybercafés in his city and others inside São Paulo, self-taught in systems, Delgatti said he decided to release the files because he was disappointed with prosecutors. Four of his friends were also arrested for gang involvement, and one said Delgatti wanted to take advantage of the information.

The truth is that Delgatti managed to contact journalist Manuela Dvila, communist leader and former vice-candidate of Fernando Haddad in 2018, the formula that replaced Lula in this election. Ella recommended that the hacker contact Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who exposed the Snowden leaks.

Married to a Brazilian deputy, David Miranda, with whom he has two children, Greenwald received the material and started producing leak notes, all devastating on the privacy of how the accusations and sentences were simmered or quickly cooked in Lava Jato.

Institutionally, the most serious leaks concerned illegal operations carried out by prosecutors, with Moro’s endorsement, to investigate potential witnesses, extort defendants from whistleblowers and use journalists to publish press operations.

The leaks showed that Moro, in addition to being a judge, was conducting investigations and guiding prosecutors, without informing Lula’s defense and against the provisions of the law.

The impact of Greenwald’s complaints on The Intercept portal in 2019 did not produce any institutional changes in Lava Jato, but it did coincide with Moro’s resignation as a judge and his accession as Prime Minister of Justice. by Bolsonaro.

That changed last December when all of the material confiscated during Delgatti’s arrest was made public by Federal Supreme Court Judge Ricardo Lewandowksi. It was more than a news story, with audios from prosecutor Dallagnol, and conversations in which they admitted they had little material against Lula and needed to work on the conviction and press release. .

A journalist from O Globo, for example, was used as a press officer, that is, as a consultant for outreach strategies and to review press releases.

Delgatti last spoke in February with the Brasil247 portal and a day later was threatened by a judge that if he continued to testify he could return to Brasilia. “The last thing I want is to go back there, I’m not a criminal,” said Delgatti, now treated as a hero by those who see Lula free and a candidate.