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Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

bhk 3y ago
Doesn't this sound like a dictatorship?
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  It is. We brazilians are living under a judiciary monarchy of sorts. The supreme court basically does whatever it wants.
  - archon1410 3y ago
    I think I once read an interesting term for "rule through courts" in reference to Islamic/sharia courts (which also had some tribal significance iirc) in Somalia who acted as the de facto after the central govt collapsed. I can't find it again.
    - dhoe 3y ago
      Kritarchy. Both the phenomenon and the word are pretty rare.
  - forabolsonaro 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - dancemethis 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      > Nah, there is equilibrium between the three powers. Not really. Judiciary is basically governing the country. Supreme court legislates by basically interpreting or ignoring laws however they want. This isn't just me either, actual lawyers have told me this to my face years ago. Only now do I fully appreciate the truth of those words. I mean, a supreme court judge just presented his "suggestions" for the censorship laws currently under discussion. The same guy who basically ran all over the constitution during last year's election over "fake news" in political campaigns. You gotta be kidding me. Every single day it's news like this one. Supreme court suspends Bolsonaro's law. Supreme court votes that same law back into effect. You'd think they're running the country... And they are. The stroke of a pen makes police do whatever they want so yeah. > You don't see them bickering with the current executive branch. Not anymore anyway. The supreme court judges are openly partial to the party currently in power. There's videos of them hugging Lula like they're close friends. Hell, I remember watching a video of one of these judges literally say out loud he was proud of being partial towards the communists. > Hearken back to like 12 years ago, before all those righty rats left the sewers. Much quieter times in the judiciary. Welp. I'm not sure if you realize you're proving my point.
      - jalbertoni 3y ago
        > The stroke of a pen makes police do whatever they want so yeah. You mean like when an order telling the police to remove people camped in front of military bases asking for a coup was signed in early December, but it took until the actual coup attempt in January for the police to actually do anything about it? Okay, no, let's be completely fair. The police was since December making sure the camped people didn't spill over into the street and block traffic. So yeah, the supreme court controls at least Judy Hopps. > Hell, I remember watching a video of one of these judges literally say out loud he was proud of being partial towards the communists. Assuming this is true, I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about. The current party in government was already considered in the 80s to be center-left, and they only mellowed more towards the center in recent years, with pretty much all internal factions that had moderately radical ideas leaving the party. Emphasis mine on the last line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_(Brazil)#Factions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_(Brazil)#Fact... - Workers' Cause (CO) – seceded from the party in 1990 as the Workers' Cause Party (PCO) - Socialist Convergence [pt] (CS) – seceded in 1993 as part of Unified Workers' Socialist Party (PSTU) - Workers' Socialist Current (CST) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Socialist Left Movement (MES) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Popular Socialist Action (APS) – seceded in 2005 and joined the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Tendency for the Workers' Revolutionary Party (TPOR) – Trotskyist faction that seceded in 1990 as the Workers' Revolutionary Party (POR) - Marxist Left (EM), the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency. Marxist Left released a statement saying that "for the revolutionaries, there is no more room for the construction of socialist ideas within PT".
        matheusmoreira 3y ago
        > You mean like I mean like when they walked all over the constitution by censoring Bolsonaro supporters left and right. Literal unabashed unconstitutional censorship, openly biased against Bolsonaro at that. There's plenty wrong with the literal concentration camp they set up in Brasília too. People imprisoned without any charges. Only recently did they vote to turn some of them into actual defendants. Not to mention the embarrassing videos that leaked recently that imply that whole "terrorist" thing was a false flag operation. Meanwhile they released PCC drug traffickers involved in the torture and assassination attempt against the Lava Jato judge and his family. It's comical. > I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about PT, obviously. The fact Lula is a communist is news? It's becoming a pain to have to constantly remind people of this. There's videos of him literally saying his objective is to install socialism in Brazil. Decades old videos. I have no reason to doubt the man's own words and his actions certainly don't leave any room for doubt. Whether the other communists think he's a real communist... Who cares, really?
  - timeon 3y ago
    > judiciary monarchy of sorts Do they have mandates for life?
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Yes. Supreme court judge mandates are essentially lifetime. There's no fixed term, only way they leave is when they're forced to retire at 75 years old. They're just now trying to limit it to 8 years.
- dancemethis 3y ago
  It doesn't, really. It's specifically because Telegram failed to deliver all the requested information on certain nazi propaganda spreader groups.
  - LewisVerstappen 3y ago
    Who defined nazi propaganda spreader groups? Who draws the line? First Nazi propaganda spreaders, then gay rights activists? Sounds extremely dangerous to have this kind of centralized control.
    - dancemethis 3y ago
      Sorry, but if one is directly stating nazi ideals, symbols, denying the ocurrence of hate crimes, spreading information on how to create weapons and more effectively invade schools to "go for the high score", one isn't a gay rights activist. It's a nazi. It's not a situation where people who just didn't get enough information (or downright wackos) can try and relativize the contents. It's quite, quite clear.
    - cjalmeida 3y ago
      The Telegram group is literally called “Brazilian Anti-semite Movement”. I don’t think they were sharing pot pie recipes there…
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      'First they came for the nazis', really?
    - sofixa 3y ago
      Ah, the great slippery slope argument. Assuming good faith, most developed countries have hate (and similar) speech laws, with Nazism being explicitly banned in most (all? maybe Spain/Portugal/Switzerland are exceptions) of Europe. Same goes for antisemitism, or in general racial/religious hatred/discrimination to various extents. It's not a slippery slope "oh what will they ban next", it's "this kind of thing has proven itself to be extremely dangerous and is detrimental to everyone, hence it's banned". And it has been for decades, and nobody has just added gay activists, including in very anti-LGBTQ countries like Poland. You might also want to look up the paradox of tolerance, it's a fun read.
- jalbertoni 3y ago
  Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data. However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs. The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse. For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious. What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users. So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data. Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- p-e-w 3y ago
  The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Its sole purpose is to attack certain institutions and/or governments, while excluding other institutions and governments from criticism even though they share most or all of the same characteristics. Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?" They are not. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. Yet I don't think it's been a month since I last saw news of some politician being banned from holding office because they posted "fake news" online or something. Basically the strategy now is to criminalize "fake news", accuse your opponents of spreading it and deplatform them because criminals can't hold political office. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    You make many good points but this is absurd: The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian even if it has nominally democratic institutions like North Korea or Iraq under the Ba'ath party. To be sure, the word is bandied about a lot in political discourse as in the comment you replied to, but it is well-defined.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      > Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian Really? How? I mean of course without resorting to what amounts to political opinions.
      - 3y ago
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. I think the judge is reaching a bit but I don't know much about Brazil's legal code. Common law countries tend to be extremely accommodating of business entities because they're obsessed with procedure (imho) to the detriment of doing any enforcement. Civil law jurisdictions take the approach of 'we need compliance up front, we can quibble about legal liability afterwards.' Common law countries demand high levels of personal accountability but have elaborate mechanics for distributing accountability across organizations that (again imho) allow the creation of private quasi-sovereignty, and they maintain this in part because it attracts capital to those countries.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. That's assuming the judge actually followed the law and the constitution, which isn't obvious at all in this case.
- xinayder 3y ago
  Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content. When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not. Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information. A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil > a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article What scandal are you referring to? I'd like to read about it. Let's make some Streisand magic happen!
    - xinayder 3y ago
      https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/04/15/stf-censura-sites-e-e-manda-retirar-materia-que-liga-toffoli-a-odebrecht.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/04/15/stf-censura... https://www.intercept.com.br/2019/04/15/toffoli-crusoe-reportagem-stf-censura/ https://www.intercept.com.br/2019/04/15/toffoli-crusoe-repor...
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        Globo even called it censorship. How times change. Thanks.
din_sup 3y ago
Telegram indeed handed over IP address and phone number to the court. https://download.uol.com.br/files/2023/04/657265820_telegram-decisao-.pdf https://download.uol.com.br/files/2023/04/657265820_telegram...
whatsu 3y ago
No company should think it's above the national laws
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  So they should also hand out the names and locations of people organizing anti-war protests in Russia if ever requested.
  - comechao 3y ago
    Good point, that’s why this conversation has more nuance. In this case, a single judge from one of the Brazilian states has decided to take down an app for the entire country.
    - rektide 3y ago
      Man the judicial systems of the world keep seeming like the new unchecked off their rockers loonies. Definitely feeling like the weekest link in democracy.
      - pseudo0 3y ago
        Advocacy groups have gotten very good at forum-shopping the most extreme district court judges and convincing them to issue nation-wide injunctions. That practice probably does need to be curtailed. We saw it with the recent abortion pill issue but it was also happening with Trump's immigration restrictions, for example. No matter which side of the aisle it is coming from, some random judge in Hawaii or Texas should not be able to block nation-wide legislation without an exceptionally good reason.
        Nursie 3y ago
        I mean, presumably that reason will be violation of the law? It's not like the judge just wakes up one day and decides "Hey, I'm going to fuck this up for everyone". There's a case for the judge to hear, and actions based on rulings. Higher courts can decide if they stand up to scrutiny (and there are often ways for effects to be stayed pending the rulings of these higher courts - see for instance Elizabeth Holmes staying out of prison again today). Personally I think it's great that judges can make rulings that affect the operations of large multinational companies and services - remove that and we're even more in thrall to big money, with even less scope for legal remedy. Now when law is applied flippantly, corruptly, poorly, with bias etc and the country does nothing to fix it, that's on the country to fix itself and run better, not by removing the power for the 'little guy' to have any influence at all.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
Good luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state directly. I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
- kelnos 3y ago
  > I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine? I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines. Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    It's not about the money. The fines are because Telegram won't reveal who's operating (neo-Nazi) accounts on their platform, with an added bit of political shenanigans to muddy the waters on top of it.
- pmeira 3y ago
  Last year when something like this happened, it came out that there's a legal representative in Rio: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/02/telegram-has-had-a-representative-in-brazil-for-7-years-while-ignoring-supreme-court-and-electoral-court.shtml https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/0...
  - buitreVirtual 3y ago
    So they can talk to the representatives. They cannot make them remove the app.
tapoxi 3y ago
I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life. The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
- jojobas 3y ago
  They just couldn't win and gave up. They accidentally crippled Github, large portions of google cloud and even their own government services while trying to blacklist Telegram and figured it was not worth the risk and getting laughed at. The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    Why couldn't they do DPI and block the protocol?
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Because SSL is SSL. They sure tried to block a lot of it. I guess they could collect public keys and block them, but blocking itself is still done by ISP on Roskomnadzor's orders, and they didn't include this capability. That would be another cat and mouse game anyway, you can cut new keypairs faster than you can block them.
      - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
        India does DNS and SNI (which exposes the hostname) based TLS blocking, I wonder why Russia couldn’t do the same.
        jojobas 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure Telegram runs their own dns with dynamic addresses and you can create a bunch of certificates for weird host names to dupe SNI. Russia dedicated quite some resources to it and couldn't win. I don't think it had any chance unless they're willing to DPI 100% of traffic China style, but even then it's fundamentally impossible to tell random google cloud/aws website api traffic from telegram.
antisocialist 3y ago
Supposedly it's about the children. Sao Paulo solved the problem: > Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards. https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attacks-us-51832f5663d9f7e9591d660ce086205b https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attac... This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun . I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech. Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups. There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations. Disclosure: I own xx coins.
- speeder 3y ago
  You are correct. Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one. Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues. Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Strongly against free speech... They are discussing a "fake news" law literally right now. It contains terms like "internet supervision entity".
schoen 3y ago
This has happened several times before with other services: https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/ https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/ Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that. Also, the political scenario was different. Brazil used to at least pretend to be a democracy with a constitution and rule of law. Since then, these supreme court judges have done far worse than block some messaging service. This is literally nothing to people like them.
  - schoen 3y ago
    > This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that. I think you're mistaken, unless there was an incredibly rapid sequence of events in this case. https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grupos-neonazistas.pdf https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grup... Seção Judiciária do Espírito Santo 1ª Vara Federal de Linhares [...] assinado por WELLINGTON LOPES DA SILVA That would be a first instance (trial) court, not any kind of appellate court. (Though in the Federal judiciary rather than the state judiciary.)
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Yeah, looks like I'm mistaken. I think I read "federal judge" and mentally substituted supreme court. I apologize.
  - cjalmeida 3y ago
    Order was issued by a trial federal judge (1a instância). Please stop spreading conspiracy misinformation.
anonymousiam 3y ago
I am more disturbed by the fact that the infrastructure was already in place to instantly block Telegram as soon as a judge ordered it.
- vitorgrs 3y ago
  Hm? Every ISP is able to block websites. This happens constantly, specially with piracy-related websites.
  - dudus 3y ago
    Yes sure. It's just very efficient apparently. More than expected for government technical stuff.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      When I worked at an ISP we had standard procedures to follow when receiving requests from legal authorities. All our contacts were strictly mediated by our legal team, who filtered requests and prevented any direct contact with the authorities (which could lead to complying to illegal requests).
      - IYasha 3y ago
        Pretty much the same in my country. And, as I've heard, there was surprisingly non-zero number of "invalid" requests.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  It's been in place for decades. Nearly a decade ago I posted here on HN about brazilian judges blocking WhatsApp nationwide. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-founder-brazil-shut-down-facebook/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Happens all the time in the UK.
epups 3y ago
[flagged]
- TheDong 3y ago
  I don't see how that context helps. To quote: > The company told the police that the groups had been deleted and that it could not recover the data. The judge's order to suspend telegram is because they did not comply, which apparently saying "that data does not exist" is not complying. If "No, we cannot give you that data" is grounds for this sort of action, that sounds an awful lot like "companies cannot delete or end-to-end encrypt user's data", since those operations would similarly result in a "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data".
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data". That's essentially contempt of court here in Brazil. They've blocked WhatsApp nationwide here before multiple times for that. WhatsApp, a messaging service pretty much every person here depends on. Judges are basically gods here by the way. It's a common saying. "Doctors think they're gods, judges know it". Lawyers tell me that there's no need to comply with court orders when it is literally impossible to comply. The judges order your imprisonment anyway. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-founder-brazil-shut-down-facebook/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-... I remember watching this shit in the news. They interviewed a judge, she was basically foaming at the mouth with rage. "Who do they think they are? Refusing to give us the data? Answering to us in english?" I loved it, I thought things were on the right track. I was wrong.
  - epups 3y ago
    Telegram has a long history of obfuscation when it comes to court orders. In Brazil, they simply ignored previous court orders until they were banned. They played a similar trick in Germany too, and backed down after heavy fines: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-takes-on-telegram-to-fight-extremism/a-60474738 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-takes-on-telegram-to-fight-ext... So, I wouldn't take anything they say at face value. It's not only about giving out the information they have on these individuals, it's also about shutting down other similar groups according to the court order. I'm not a free speech absolutist, I think that no platform should harbor Nazism and death threats, particularly after they have already resulted in murder. If they fundamentally cannot comply with this, then they should be banned indeed.
ykonstant 3y ago
Oh come on, now I want to make a similar app and name it Disbelief.
DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
Honestly, I don´t know what this type of post is doing on HN. Very strong political bias and misinformation being spread in the comments, feels like I'm on Reddit.
ttaranto 3y ago
It is imperative to enforce the law and block internet platforms that fail to comply with legal regulations. The internet cannot serve as a sanctuary for promoting neo-Nazi groups and other illegal activities, as it must remain subject to legal jurisdiction. All individuals and organizations, whether online or offline, must be held accountable to the law. It is unacceptable to allow hate speech, homophobia, and the promotion of heinous crimes, such as child murder, to proliferate unchecked. The platform Telegram, for example, was rightfully blocked for refusing to provide authorities with phone numbers. It is essential that this platform and others that violate legal standards be severely punished to ensure compliance with the law.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  I'm not a digital privacy dogmatist and in like general terms I agree that sometimes states have legitimate powers to wiretap or whatever. And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary. But technology has put us in a challenging position wherein it seems like our only two choices are living in a perfect surveillance state all the time, where everything can be, in principal, observed by the state at a whim and the former reality, where people can have genuinely private communications. When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    It's a politico-technological arms race. Government makes laws, people make technology to circumvent those laws, government makes new laws, people make new technology. With every iteration, government must increase its tyranny to enjoy the same level of control it had before. Governments get worse and worse in a desperate attempt to hold on to their power. We'll either end up in a totalitarian state or with an uncontrollable population, whichever comes first. Who'll reach their limits first? Brazilian government is already speaking of giving judges and politicians total power to censor things on the internet. They're speaking of "autonomous internet supervision entities". Yeah.

bhk 3y ago

Doesn't this sound like a dictatorship?

matheusmoreira 3y ago
It is. We brazilians are living under a judiciary monarchy of sorts. The supreme court basically does whatever it wants.
- archon1410 3y ago
  I think I once read an interesting term for "rule through courts" in reference to Islamic/sharia courts (which also had some tribal significance iirc) in Somalia who acted as the de facto after the central govt collapsed. I can't find it again.
  - dhoe 3y ago
    Kritarchy. Both the phenomenon and the word are pretty rare.
- forabolsonaro 3y ago
  [flagged]
- dancemethis 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > Nah, there is equilibrium between the three powers. Not really. Judiciary is basically governing the country. Supreme court legislates by basically interpreting or ignoring laws however they want. This isn't just me either, actual lawyers have told me this to my face years ago. Only now do I fully appreciate the truth of those words. I mean, a supreme court judge just presented his "suggestions" for the censorship laws currently under discussion. The same guy who basically ran all over the constitution during last year's election over "fake news" in political campaigns. You gotta be kidding me. Every single day it's news like this one. Supreme court suspends Bolsonaro's law. Supreme court votes that same law back into effect. You'd think they're running the country... And they are. The stroke of a pen makes police do whatever they want so yeah. > You don't see them bickering with the current executive branch. Not anymore anyway. The supreme court judges are openly partial to the party currently in power. There's videos of them hugging Lula like they're close friends. Hell, I remember watching a video of one of these judges literally say out loud he was proud of being partial towards the communists. > Hearken back to like 12 years ago, before all those righty rats left the sewers. Much quieter times in the judiciary. Welp. I'm not sure if you realize you're proving my point.
    - jalbertoni 3y ago
      > The stroke of a pen makes police do whatever they want so yeah. You mean like when an order telling the police to remove people camped in front of military bases asking for a coup was signed in early December, but it took until the actual coup attempt in January for the police to actually do anything about it? Okay, no, let's be completely fair. The police was since December making sure the camped people didn't spill over into the street and block traffic. So yeah, the supreme court controls at least Judy Hopps. > Hell, I remember watching a video of one of these judges literally say out loud he was proud of being partial towards the communists. Assuming this is true, I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about. The current party in government was already considered in the 80s to be center-left, and they only mellowed more towards the center in recent years, with pretty much all internal factions that had moderately radical ideas leaving the party. Emphasis mine on the last line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_(Brazil)#Factions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_(Brazil)#Fact... - Workers' Cause (CO) – seceded from the party in 1990 as the Workers' Cause Party (PCO) - Socialist Convergence [pt] (CS) – seceded in 1993 as part of Unified Workers' Socialist Party (PSTU) - Workers' Socialist Current (CST) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Socialist Left Movement (MES) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Popular Socialist Action (APS) – seceded in 2005 and joined the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) - Tendency for the Workers' Revolutionary Party (TPOR) – Trotskyist faction that seceded in 1990 as the Workers' Revolutionary Party (POR) - Marxist Left (EM), the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency. Marxist Left released a statement saying that "for the revolutionaries, there is no more room for the construction of socialist ideas within PT".
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        > You mean like I mean like when they walked all over the constitution by censoring Bolsonaro supporters left and right. Literal unabashed unconstitutional censorship, openly biased against Bolsonaro at that. There's plenty wrong with the literal concentration camp they set up in Brasília too. People imprisoned without any charges. Only recently did they vote to turn some of them into actual defendants. Not to mention the embarrassing videos that leaked recently that imply that whole "terrorist" thing was a false flag operation. Meanwhile they released PCC drug traffickers involved in the torture and assassination attempt against the Lava Jato judge and his family. It's comical. > I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about PT, obviously. The fact Lula is a communist is news? It's becoming a pain to have to constantly remind people of this. There's videos of him literally saying his objective is to install socialism in Brazil. Decades old videos. I have no reason to doubt the man's own words and his actions certainly don't leave any room for doubt. Whether the other communists think he's a real communist... Who cares, really?
- timeon 3y ago
  > judiciary monarchy of sorts Do they have mandates for life?
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Yes. Supreme court judge mandates are essentially lifetime. There's no fixed term, only way they leave is when they're forced to retire at 75 years old. They're just now trying to limit it to 8 years.
dancemethis 3y ago
It doesn't, really. It's specifically because Telegram failed to deliver all the requested information on certain nazi propaganda spreader groups.
- LewisVerstappen 3y ago
  Who defined nazi propaganda spreader groups? Who draws the line? First Nazi propaganda spreaders, then gay rights activists? Sounds extremely dangerous to have this kind of centralized control.
  - dancemethis 3y ago
    Sorry, but if one is directly stating nazi ideals, symbols, denying the ocurrence of hate crimes, spreading information on how to create weapons and more effectively invade schools to "go for the high score", one isn't a gay rights activist. It's a nazi. It's not a situation where people who just didn't get enough information (or downright wackos) can try and relativize the contents. It's quite, quite clear.
  - cjalmeida 3y ago
    The Telegram group is literally called “Brazilian Anti-semite Movement”. I don’t think they were sharing pot pie recipes there…
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    'First they came for the nazis', really?
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Ah, the great slippery slope argument. Assuming good faith, most developed countries have hate (and similar) speech laws, with Nazism being explicitly banned in most (all? maybe Spain/Portugal/Switzerland are exceptions) of Europe. Same goes for antisemitism, or in general racial/religious hatred/discrimination to various extents. It's not a slippery slope "oh what will they ban next", it's "this kind of thing has proven itself to be extremely dangerous and is detrimental to everyone, hence it's banned". And it has been for decades, and nobody has just added gay activists, including in very anti-LGBTQ countries like Poland. You might also want to look up the paradox of tolerance, it's a fun read.
jalbertoni 3y ago
Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data. However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs. The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse. For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious. What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users. So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data. Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
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p-e-w 3y ago
The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Its sole purpose is to attack certain institutions and/or governments, while excluding other institutions and governments from criticism even though they share most or all of the same characteristics. Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?" They are not. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. Yet I don't think it's been a month since I last saw news of some politician being banned from holding office because they posted "fake news" online or something. Basically the strategy now is to criminalize "fake news", accuse your opponents of spreading it and deplatform them because criminals can't hold political office. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  You make many good points but this is absurd: The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian even if it has nominally democratic institutions like North Korea or Iraq under the Ba'ath party. To be sure, the word is bandied about a lot in political discourse as in the comment you replied to, but it is well-defined.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian Really? How? I mean of course without resorting to what amounts to political opinions.
    - 3y ago
anigbrowl 3y ago
No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. I think the judge is reaching a bit but I don't know much about Brazil's legal code. Common law countries tend to be extremely accommodating of business entities because they're obsessed with procedure (imho) to the detriment of doing any enforcement. Civil law jurisdictions take the approach of 'we need compliance up front, we can quibble about legal liability afterwards.' Common law countries demand high levels of personal accountability but have elaborate mechanics for distributing accountability across organizations that (again imho) allow the creation of private quasi-sovereignty, and they maintain this in part because it attracts capital to those countries.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. That's assuming the judge actually followed the law and the constitution, which isn't obvious at all in this case.
xinayder 3y ago
Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content. When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not. Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information. A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil > a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article What scandal are you referring to? I'd like to read about it. Let's make some Streisand magic happen!
  - xinayder 3y ago
    https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/04/15/stf-censura-sites-e-e-manda-retirar-materia-que-liga-toffoli-a-odebrecht.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/04/15/stf-censura... https://www.intercept.com.br/2019/04/15/toffoli-crusoe-reportagem-stf-censura/ https://www.intercept.com.br/2019/04/15/toffoli-crusoe-repor...
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Globo even called it censorship. How times change. Thanks.

Telegram indeed handed over IP address and phone number to the court. https://download.uol.com.br/files/2023/04/657265820_telegram-decisao-.pdf https://download.uol.com.br/files/2023/04/657265820_telegram...

whatsu 3y ago

No company should think it's above the national laws

alwayslikethis 3y ago
So they should also hand out the names and locations of people organizing anti-war protests in Russia if ever requested.
- comechao 3y ago
  Good point, that’s why this conversation has more nuance. In this case, a single judge from one of the Brazilian states has decided to take down an app for the entire country.
  - rektide 3y ago
    Man the judicial systems of the world keep seeming like the new unchecked off their rockers loonies. Definitely feeling like the weekest link in democracy.
    - pseudo0 3y ago
      Advocacy groups have gotten very good at forum-shopping the most extreme district court judges and convincing them to issue nation-wide injunctions. That practice probably does need to be curtailed. We saw it with the recent abortion pill issue but it was also happening with Trump's immigration restrictions, for example. No matter which side of the aisle it is coming from, some random judge in Hawaii or Texas should not be able to block nation-wide legislation without an exceptionally good reason.
      - Nursie 3y ago
        I mean, presumably that reason will be violation of the law? It's not like the judge just wakes up one day and decides "Hey, I'm going to fuck this up for everyone". There's a case for the judge to hear, and actions based on rulings. Higher courts can decide if they stand up to scrutiny (and there are often ways for effects to be stayed pending the rulings of these higher courts - see for instance Elizabeth Holmes staying out of prison again today). Personally I think it's great that judges can make rulings that affect the operations of large multinational companies and services - remove that and we're even more in thrall to big money, with even less scope for legal remedy. Now when law is applied flippantly, corruptly, poorly, with bias etc and the country does nothing to fix it, that's on the country to fix itself and run better, not by removing the power for the 'little guy' to have any influence at all.

alwayslikethis 3y ago

Good luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state directly. I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?

kelnos 3y ago
> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine? I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines. Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
- zamnos 3y ago
  It's not about the money. The fines are because Telegram won't reveal who's operating (neo-Nazi) accounts on their platform, with an added bit of political shenanigans to muddy the waters on top of it.
pmeira 3y ago
Last year when something like this happened, it came out that there's a legal representative in Rio: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/02/telegram-has-had-a-representative-in-brazil-for-7-years-while-ignoring-supreme-court-and-electoral-court.shtml https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/0...
- buitreVirtual 3y ago
  So they can talk to the representatives. They cannot make them remove the app.

tapoxi 3y ago

I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life. The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.

jojobas 3y ago
They just couldn't win and gave up. They accidentally crippled Github, large portions of google cloud and even their own government services while trying to blacklist Telegram and figured it was not worth the risk and getting laughed at. The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  Why couldn't they do DPI and block the protocol?
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Because SSL is SSL. They sure tried to block a lot of it. I guess they could collect public keys and block them, but blocking itself is still done by ISP on Roskomnadzor's orders, and they didn't include this capability. That would be another cat and mouse game anyway, you can cut new keypairs faster than you can block them.
    - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      India does DNS and SNI (which exposes the hostname) based TLS blocking, I wonder why Russia couldn’t do the same.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure Telegram runs their own dns with dynamic addresses and you can create a bunch of certificates for weird host names to dupe SNI. Russia dedicated quite some resources to it and couldn't win. I don't think it had any chance unless they're willing to DPI 100% of traffic China style, but even then it's fundamentally impossible to tell random google cloud/aws website api traffic from telegram.

antisocialist 3y ago

Supposedly it's about the children. Sao Paulo solved the problem: > Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards. https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attacks-us-51832f5663d9f7e9591d660ce086205b https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attac... This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun . I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech. Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups. There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations. Disclosure: I own xx coins.

speeder 3y ago
You are correct. Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one. Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues. Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Strongly against free speech... They are discussing a "fake news" law literally right now. It contains terms like "internet supervision entity".

schoen 3y ago

This has happened several times before with other services: https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/ https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/ Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that. Also, the political scenario was different. Brazil used to at least pretend to be a democracy with a constitution and rule of law. Since then, these supreme court judges have done far worse than block some messaging service. This is literally nothing to people like them.
- schoen 3y ago
  > This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that. I think you're mistaken, unless there was an incredibly rapid sequence of events in this case. https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grupos-neonazistas.pdf https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grup... Seção Judiciária do Espírito Santo 1ª Vara Federal de Linhares [...] assinado por WELLINGTON LOPES DA SILVA That would be a first instance (trial) court, not any kind of appellate court. (Though in the Federal judiciary rather than the state judiciary.)
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Yeah, looks like I'm mistaken. I think I read "federal judge" and mentally substituted supreme court. I apologize.
- cjalmeida 3y ago
  Order was issued by a trial federal judge (1a instância). Please stop spreading conspiracy misinformation.

anonymousiam 3y ago

I am more disturbed by the fact that the infrastructure was already in place to instantly block Telegram as soon as a judge ordered it.

vitorgrs 3y ago
Hm? Every ISP is able to block websites. This happens constantly, specially with piracy-related websites.
- dudus 3y ago
  Yes sure. It's just very efficient apparently. More than expected for government technical stuff.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    When I worked at an ISP we had standard procedures to follow when receiving requests from legal authorities. All our contacts were strictly mediated by our legal team, who filtered requests and prevented any direct contact with the authorities (which could lead to complying to illegal requests).
    - IYasha 3y ago
      Pretty much the same in my country. And, as I've heard, there was surprisingly non-zero number of "invalid" requests.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
It's been in place for decades. Nearly a decade ago I posted here on HN about brazilian judges blocking WhatsApp nationwide. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-founder-brazil-shut-down-facebook/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
RobotToaster 3y ago
Happens all the time in the UK.

epups 3y ago

[flagged]

TheDong 3y ago
I don't see how that context helps. To quote: > The company told the police that the groups had been deleted and that it could not recover the data. The judge's order to suspend telegram is because they did not comply, which apparently saying "that data does not exist" is not complying. If "No, we cannot give you that data" is grounds for this sort of action, that sounds an awful lot like "companies cannot delete or end-to-end encrypt user's data", since those operations would similarly result in a "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data".
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data". That's essentially contempt of court here in Brazil. They've blocked WhatsApp nationwide here before multiple times for that. WhatsApp, a messaging service pretty much every person here depends on. Judges are basically gods here by the way. It's a common saying. "Doctors think they're gods, judges know it". Lawyers tell me that there's no need to comply with court orders when it is literally impossible to comply. The judges order your imprisonment anyway. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-founder-brazil-shut-down-facebook/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-... I remember watching this shit in the news. They interviewed a judge, she was basically foaming at the mouth with rage. "Who do they think they are? Refusing to give us the data? Answering to us in english?" I loved it, I thought things were on the right track. I was wrong.
- epups 3y ago
  Telegram has a long history of obfuscation when it comes to court orders. In Brazil, they simply ignored previous court orders until they were banned. They played a similar trick in Germany too, and backed down after heavy fines: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-takes-on-telegram-to-fight-extremism/a-60474738 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-takes-on-telegram-to-fight-ext... So, I wouldn't take anything they say at face value. It's not only about giving out the information they have on these individuals, it's also about shutting down other similar groups according to the court order. I'm not a free speech absolutist, I think that no platform should harbor Nazism and death threats, particularly after they have already resulted in murder. If they fundamentally cannot comply with this, then they should be banned indeed.

ykonstant 3y ago

Oh come on, now I want to make a similar app and name it Disbelief.

DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago

Honestly, I don´t know what this type of post is doing on HN. Very strong political bias and misinformation being spread in the comments, feels like I'm on Reddit.

ttaranto 3y ago

It is imperative to enforce the law and block internet platforms that fail to comply with legal regulations. The internet cannot serve as a sanctuary for promoting neo-Nazi groups and other illegal activities, as it must remain subject to legal jurisdiction. All individuals and organizations, whether online or offline, must be held accountable to the law. It is unacceptable to allow hate speech, homophobia, and the promotion of heinous crimes, such as child murder, to proliferate unchecked. The platform Telegram, for example, was rightfully blocked for refusing to provide authorities with phone numbers. It is essential that this platform and others that violate legal standards be severely punished to ensure compliance with the law.

nathan_compton 3y ago
I'm not a digital privacy dogmatist and in like general terms I agree that sometimes states have legitimate powers to wiretap or whatever. And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary. But technology has put us in a challenging position wherein it seems like our only two choices are living in a perfect surveillance state all the time, where everything can be, in principal, observed by the state at a whim and the former reality, where people can have genuinely private communications. When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  It's a politico-technological arms race. Government makes laws, people make technology to circumvent those laws, government makes new laws, people make new technology. With every iteration, government must increase its tyranny to enjoy the same level of control it had before. Governments get worse and worse in a desperate attempt to hold on to their power. We'll either end up in a totalitarian state or with an uncontrollable population, whichever comes first. Who'll reach their limits first? Brazilian government is already speaking of giving judges and politicians total power to censor things on the internet. They're speaking of "autonomous internet supervision entities". Yeah.