Brazil's Michel Temer Orders Spying on Dilma's PT Party

The Brazilian interim president, Michel temer, ordered Friday the Institutional Security Office, a body tasked with providing intelligence and spying services to the country’s president and his cabinet, to spy on President Dilma Rousseff and her Workers's Party (PT) claiming they have been behind the protests against his unelected government.

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Several observers questioned if such move was constitutionally legal and whether Temer is allowed to use the intelligence agency to monitor an opposition political party and its members.

“Is Brazil's new president ordering spies to monitor the opposition? Can this be legal?,” Simon Romero, the New York Times bureau chief questioned in a tweet Friday. The cabinet intel body is run by the military and headed by Army General Sérgio Etchegoyen.

Temer office also announced that his appearances and public events will only be made public at the last minute in a bid to avoid protests against him or against his government which have become a regular occurrence since he took office in May 12.

He assumed the position of acting president after the country’s senate voted last month to suspend President Rousseff for 180 pending a trial by the Supreme Court over corruption allegations.

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Protests around the installed president are fueled by a series of new leaked recordings that reveal that members of his cabinet and other key opposition figures schemed to use Rousseff’s ouster as a way to put a stop to corruption investigations targeting many of her rivals.

Unions have called the removal of Rousseff a "coup against the working class," while the former head of the now-defunct Ministry of Women, Racial Equality, and Human Rights, Nilma Lino Gomes, labeled it a multidimensional coup with gender, race, and class consequences.