Spying on the cell phone of the couple will be federal crime in Argentina

A user uses his mobile phone. GETTY IMAGES

Uncontrolled jealousy will have serious consequences in Argentina . The Supreme Court ruled that spying on the couple's email, Facebook and cell phone is a federal crime, meaning that it must be investigated by the same judges who judge terrorism, drug trafficking or corruption. Magistrates ruled in the case of a woman who reported her husband for violating his passwords on social networks and mail services and even copied his SIM card data for evidence of alleged infidelity. Once the question of the quality of the crime has been defined, a federal judge must now investigate and issue a judgment.

The case came to the Court because a judge understood that the woman's complaint did not exceed strictly individual interest and, therefore, did not justify the participation of a federal court. But the intervention of the deputy attorney general, Eduardo Casal, changed everything. The chief prosecutor said in a long letter that "the use of the social network and electronic mail constitute an electronic communication or computer data of restricted access, whose access is only possible through a means that by its own characteristics is within the telecommunication services ". As issues related to telecommunications "are of interest to the Nation", misuse is a federal crime. The Supreme Court supported the prosecutor's argument without dissent.

The superiors had similarly failed in 2014 in a case related to the violation of a Facebook account, also by a subject of competition between two judges, one federal and one contravention. At that time, the Court treated the issue as a "breach of correspondence", comparable to e-mail espionage. In his arguments he used word for word the same ones that the prosecutor has now recovered in his last ruling: as it is the violation of a telecommunications service can not be considered an action limited to the individual scope.

According to Argentine law, electronic espionage deserves penalties of between 15 days and 6 months, and therefore is releaseable. The penalty may be increased to one year if it is proven that the accused disseminated the data to a third party. The jealous will think twice before snooping on their partners.