9 ms·

Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet

157 points by auctiontheory 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tedivm 13y ago
I'm glad I hit refresh and saw that the sensationalist title was edited, but even without that I think this article is a bit over the top. What they're doing is simple- * Building more direct connections between themselves and other countries, to reduce the amount of traffic going through the US. * Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens. * Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying. It's not surprising, and it's certainly not going to balkanize the internet. What it could do is cost US companies a ton of money in lost revenue as services move out of the country.
- spacebe4time 13y ago
  > * Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens. And it would allow them to collect data of their own citizens much easier. Because, ya know, it's just America is a totalitarian boogie-man. All other countries are bunch of human rights loving, tree hugging fluffy bunnies.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Going by your summary, this is plain common sense. And I think the Internet will be stronger for it. Viva la Brasil
  - cfontes 13y ago
    Thanks. I don't want to sound as an asshole but... "Viva la Brasil" - is spanish and should be "Viva el Brasil" And we speak Portuguese the correct would be "Viva o Brasil" And looks like it's impossible to do this without sounding like an asshole, sorry for that.
    - wulczer 13y ago
      BTW, I think at least in Peninsular Spanish you'd say "Viva Brasil" (omitting the article).
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - mattlutze 13y ago
      Perhaps not interestingly, Google seems to think it's roughly proper Esperanto.
    - ralmeida 13y ago
      Maybe parent was doing some intertextual joke with Guevara's phrase "Viva la revolución"? Something like: http://9gag.com/gag/47152 http://9gag.com/gag/47152 http://www.juicycouture.com/accessories-fragrance-viva-la-juicy http://www.juicycouture.com/accessories-fragrance-viva-la-ju... http://www.vivalacake.com/ http://www.vivalacake.com/ http://vivalaandroid.spreadshirt.com/ http://vivalaandroid.spreadshirt.com/
  - anxiousest 13y ago
    How exactly is fracturing the Internet and stopping the free flow of information will make it "stronger"? any sort of amplified indignation about the NSA is a red herring, Brazil had that plan for a long time and now and they are using the NSA as an excuse to accelerate it, and ironically their main reason is to enable more extensive local surveillance: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/actualidad/1376172139_847597.html http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...
    - informatimago 13y ago
      Adding links between nodes is not fracturing a network, on the contrary. The strongest network is the full graph, where each node is connected to each other node, and it's also the network where it's hardest to spy communications, because they always occur directly between peers. On the contrary, the weakest network is the star network, which is basically a tree, with a central point (or a few central points) where all communications must pass thru, and where it is easy to collect all of them. With the Internet as it is built (by commercial ISP and country-wide communication monopolies), it is star shaped, and when you send a packet from Marseille to Barcelona, it goes in the best case, thru Paris and Madrid (where French and Spanish spies can copy it), and often it may even go thru Amsterdam and London (where the British, and therefore the NSA can copy it too). This is not good. And privacy apart, it makes for a brittle network, since breaking a couple of main trunks (eg. a link between Paris and London and a link between Paris and Madrid), would prevent anybody from Marseille to communicate with Barcelona. At all levels, increasing the meshing of the Internet is a good thing: add direct links with your neighbors, have your city establish direct links with neighboring cities, and of course, have your country establish direct links with neighboring countries, instead of going thru a central point in a potentially or manifestly hostile country (even if their private companies pledged to do no evil, they're still under the jug of the evil country).
      - zero_intp 13y ago
        There are MRS-MIL and LYS-ZRH fiber paths to protect the Iberian peninsula. A PAR-MAD cut does not bring down ONO or any of the other Iberian providers. Additionally, PAR-LON has more than one path, any backbone provider worth their weight will use both. Also, PAR-FRA-AMS-LON or PAR-AMS-LON are viable alternative paths should all LON-PAR paths be cut.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
  "Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil," The language in the article is "compels".
  - kroger 13y ago
    "Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil" I hope they change how hosting and domain registration work in Brazil. I gave up registering .br domains because the way it works in Brazil is very obtuse. There's a centralized register (registro.br), their web site is stuck in 1995 (you can't change data easily, etc), and you can't register a domain for more than a year at a time (you have to renew every year).
    - soneca 13y ago
      Well, I used Registro.br and GoDaddy a few times and think Registro.br is much, much easier. And, yes, you can register for more than a year. Hosting on the other hand is terrible. Expensive and unreliable and with an awful customer service.
      - dspillett 13y ago
        I wouldn't use GoDaddy as a "good" example to compare other services to!
        jebblue 13y ago
        GoDaddy is easy to use, clear, their prices broke me free from Network Solutions' high prices, they are a top domain registrar.
        dspillett 13y ago
        I've not touched them for some time having moved all the domains I used to have through them elsewhere (mainly due to opinions I have of them as a company than any technical issues as a registrar) so things may have changed. Back when I did have domains registered through them I found the interface to be very busy and cluttered, full of opportunities to be upsold to, and there was not way of just registering a domain without actively saying no to a small pile of upselling related questions. I remember setting up private name servers being relatively hasslesome too (possible, but the options not obviously easy to find). I think I pay a few cents (maybe even tens of cents, oh! the humanity!) per domain per year extra elsewhere (or did at the time of the move IIRC, I've not compared prices recently) but that isn't exactly going to break the bank for those I still bother to not let expire. > they are a top domain registrar They are certainly a popular registrar with a large customer base. Opinions on them being a top registrar vary widely especially as "top" could mean many things! But as I've not used them for a while I can't judge on technical matter or their current UI, I'll have to defer to you judgement on that. Other things would stop me ever moving back though.
- talles 13y ago
  What was the title by the way?
- kassner 13y ago
  "Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying." I have to laugh about the government asking their "USPS" to do this.
- dspillett 13y ago
  Assuming Brazil's government thinks like any other, "so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens" probably means "so we can enforce our laws allowing us to spy on you (by knowing your private keys or such), but other countries can't (unless an appropriately rich entity pays the right people for access to said keys". For proper privacy we need to implement it ourselves, unfortunately there are laws being written to ban that sort of thing for national security reasons.
r0h1n 13y ago
While it's great that countries around the world are belatedly waking up to the fact that the US wields a disproportionate amount of influence on the Internet, which it also uses to shore up its strategic military or commercial objectives, as users we ought to distrust any other country just as much as the US. IMHO Catch-all Internet surveillance is a drug that no country's intelligence or law-enforcement apparatus can stay away from. I'm based in India and am under no illusion that my government - given the chance or the technical capability - will attempt to secretly monitor its own citizens in a manner far worse than possibly the US. So while I distrust the US, I also distrust India when it comes to any kind of "control" over the Internet. And so I hope, will Brazilians. As users we ought to take our own independent and personal choices on how best to safeguard our online lives.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Does India "render" people"? The difference is the USA acts across the planet, insisting its laws apply to all the world, applying its mockery of a justice system to the majority who never voted for it. What goes on in India is for Indians. As a Brit I have no fear of Indian justice. US "justice" and attitudes scare the crap out of me.
  - r0h1n 13y ago
    Yes, India does occasionally "render" alleged terrorists. But usually from bordering and smaller countries like Nepal. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-30/india/41617686_1_yasin-bhatkal-mumbai-serial-blasts-terror-attacks http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-30/india... http://syednazakat.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-inside-story-of-india%E2%80%99s-biggest-anti-terrorism-operation-abroad/ http://syednazakat.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-inside-story... Of course it is nowhere near the reach of the US, so yes, your overall point is still valid. But I fear we're conflating two different issues here - Internet surveillance and illegal rendering. Just because some countries may not be doing the latter doesn't mean we as users should be blase about the former.
  - galvanist 13y ago
    Yes, let's look to the British to tell us how a country should keep to its borders, handle international relations, balance domestic surveillance/privacy concerns, run fair and impartial international trials, and teach us about India.
cfontes 13y ago
My country never fails to embarrass me. Brazil is the world leader in saying that it's going to do something awesome and completely forgetting about doing something in order to make that happen. Nothing is going to happen. Example: In order to have a seat in one of the trips to the international space station, Brazil should develop and build some of the windows of it. We didn't and not because we don't know how, it was because of politics. In order to make it appear that we didn't fail to the population, the president bought a X million dollars flight ticket to a random guy that today earns money by giving speeches about how dreams come true with hard work and that you can become an astronaut just like him. The biggest part of the population thinks we earned it by doing something useful for the mission. I can go on and on about this events if you need more. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/world/americas/08rio.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/world/americas/08rio.html?... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Space_Agency#International_Space_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Space_Agency#Internat... p.s: look the schedules for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics and you have a second example.
- feuteston 13y ago
  +1
- juusto 13y ago
  Oh I know your type... My countrymen never fail to embarrass me. Brazil the world leader in creating the nag-a-lot-people. </irony>
  - cfontes 13y ago
    I am just coming to a conclusion based on past facts, call that whatever you like.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Thanks for telling the truth :) As a UK resident, we're knee deep in this sort of crap as well.
  - 13y ago
kostyk 13y ago
Go Brazil!
antocv 13y ago
The balkanization of the internet is inevitable, now that we have two push forces towards that, a strong desire to stay away from other countries intelligence agencies and copyright.
- mattlutze 13y ago
  This is my concern as well. It's somewhat inevitable that the Internet will end up politically divided. The boundary-less state the fledgling has had was, in American historical corollary, the great western expansion. Eventually though structure, regulation and political boundaries are inserted by institutions designed to do those things. Brasil building more connections to the rest of the world is a good thing for global infrastructure. Diversity and multiplicity is awesome. It'll be disappointing once they start tuning their national boundary firewalls and routers to avoid or block services and end up cutting N America out of S America (presuming Chile, Argentina etc. will start moving toward a Brasil-supplied internet).
  - antocv 13y ago
    The history with an open and free for all internet that we have enjoyed does inspire me, it is somewhat amazing in retrospect that it was so, despite not having an international organization to defend these principles. The fact that it happened, perhaps due to those ideas of freedom to share knowledge and connect with each other over wast distances and boundaries, makes me believe it will happen again, in another form. We will find each other, just like we did on bbs, irc and in various in-game chats and forums, perhaps next time in a field of ciphers, stenography and darknets, small lights of communities will spring up. Next stop, hyperboria.
znowi 13y ago
> break from US-centric Internet This is in part what the delegates tried to accomplish during the "infamous" ITU summit last year. But Google et al launched a major FUD campaign to Save the Internet, when in reality it was to save American interests and keep control over the net.
- msh 13y ago
  Well, the proposal was no better that what the americans are doing. I am not from the US but if I have the choice between being the internet being run by the US or china/russia plus a bunch of other dictatorships I will go with the US (but I still abhor the NSA surveillance). Of cause, I would prefer a better option where there was a system that was not dominated by any countries but I dont see the ITU proposal as being good for the internet.
throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
"Brazil's wiretapping mania is a holdover from the country's 20-year dictatorship[...] The president of the Supreme Court, who believes he also was spied on, called police methods totalitarian. In September, Brazil's president suspended the head of the spy agency over allegations that it eavesdropped on officials." [2008] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122331824781908463.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122331824781908463.html "Eavesdropping incidents are not new. A decade ago a presidential conversation was caught when the office of the national development bank was bugged while the Telebrás phone company was being privatised, presumably so that a bidder could gain an advantage over rivals. Other incidents have occurred since, suggesting that Abin agents and phone-company employees can all too easily be bribed." http://www.economist.com/node/12060388 http://www.economist.com/node/12060388
nwh 13y ago
I'd make a comment about how I was trying to keep my data in my own country, but I'm not, Australia is happily going along with PRISM. It's not even reported in the news here.
pizza234 13y ago
This poses a very interesting psychological problem. Assuming the NSA is the bully of the situation, I wonder if the fact that the rest of the world will (hopefully) claim more and more independece, will lead NSA to back up and have a more reasonable position, or will cause it (and the government that backs it) to have a more and more bullier attitude position. After what happened, it's clear that the guys running it have a god-like image of theirselves, and I doubt that within this perspective, one would cast at least some doubt over his actions.
devx 13y ago
This is what US overreach in spying has led to, and probably more will follow Brazil in doing this soon, and I can't blame them. Hopefully the US government will realize that greed and lust for power aren't always good things, and can sometimes lead to very bad things, and the opposite of what they were expecting to get (breaking the camel's back and all that).
edoloughlin 13y ago
a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments One could argue that it would be a 'dangerous' second step.
guspe 13y ago
>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better." This is interesting. If Internet did really follow a free-for-all model, NSA would've never happened. In the same way free market benefits U.S. but takes its toll on Rwanda, the "free-for-all" internet of today benefits the Silicon Valley at the expense of the privacy of non-american people. If the United States had already taken measures to inhibit NSA's surveillance instead of justifying its actions and chasing Snowden, Brazil wouldn't have to move in that direction. It's basically U.S. unwillingness to build a truly free Internet that pushes other countries towards "independence". We should also be aware that the source of the news is a San Francisco-based newspaper, which adds yet another layer of enconomic interests to the story.
siphr 13y ago
I have been thinking about this for a good few years now and I think the idea has some value however it comes at a cost. What makes internet so good is its population. It is the population of the entire world without borders and immigration control. You can talk to anyone and approach anyone or at least you have the ability to. Knowledge rules and it is directly propotional to the number of people available on the internet. Once nations start going down the track of setting up virtual borders (believe this is what this would lead to), all flow of information will be condemned as it is in the real world. A national network would be used in making solid cases for embargos and sanctions against people and their knowledge, which they were at full liberty to share and disclose as they saw fit. Surely this is not currently at the scale of Great Firewall of China, however, it can easily become that. Consider this move as the first brick. Surely internet surveilance exists and anybody who thought it wasn't ever since its creation was either stupid or indifferent to the idea. The difference between then and now is that we have proof of this. A nation isolating itself into a pocket of its own internal communication network will not solve this problem. I personally think that it is a step back not a step forward. I believe TOR had the right idea but it is no silver bullet. People of Brazil might think that this is a good thing but rest assured all that would change is they'd be transitioning from global internet surveillance to local internet surveillance.
HugoDias 13y ago
I live in Brazil and nothing going to happen, trust me. Next.
forinti 13y ago
>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better." I find it rather annoying that everything that the current Brazilian government does gets labeled as "socialist" or "soviet" or something along those lines. Isn't having the NSA spying on everyone what you would expect of the KGB? So why can't Brazil take measures to protect its interests?
- scardine 13y ago
  There is no privacy in Brazil, you have to put your fingerprints in a database for having an ID card or driver license issued. Biometric access is being enforced for voting and a lot of other trivial citizenship exercises. There is no doubt that the PT party ("workers party" in Portuguese) has a leftist doctrine that is a mix of "Chavismo" and ancient "soviet" crap that is out of fashion even in Russia. The only reason Brazil is not as trashed as Venezuela is that Brazilian press and other civilian institutions are a little stronger. Lula (the former president) and Dilma (his puppet and actual president) endorse some of the worst dictatorships governments in the world. Lula even endorsed nut jobs like Ahmadinejad from Iran. The EUA gives these clowns as a "friendly government" label for lack of a better term. Brazil is not a democracy, it is a dumbocracy.
  - forinti 13y ago
    I can never tell if these rants are meant to be taken seriously.
    - jebblue 13y ago
      It didn't read like a rant to me, what did you read from scardine's comment that made you feel it could be perceived as a rant? Perhaps it was some venting, but that's all.
    - PauloManrique 13y ago
      Telling the truth is "rant"? I'm amazed that the international community didn't noticed we are importing slaves from Cuba.
rodolphoarruda 13y ago
The root cause of all this is the leaked document about a possible backdoor installed within Petrobras IT infrastructure. Since this company has a lot of employees at high/strategic positions nominated directly by the government, we assume that there is a continued information exchange between them and the government, and that this information is so sensitive it could expose high scale politicians to the media in an uncontrolled way (a situation which the current political party in power tries to avoid at all cost). In short, the government knows there is a lot of dirt under the Petrobras rug, and all those actions we read in the article refers to putting heavy furniture on top of it.
- PauloManrique 13y ago
  That's true, I really hope Dilma to piss Obama off so he could show us why Petrobras is about to break.
PauloManrique 13y ago
"Brazilians are among the most voracious consumers of social media, ranking No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube." While I'm afraid of president's real will, I can't stop thinking about, if we are 3 on FB, 2 on Twitter and Youtube then why not host some of the data here? We got a huge ping delay to those company servers anyway.
tonylemesmer 13y ago
So what's to stop the NDA / GCHQ hiring moles to put trojans inside these networks / organisations and getting the info anyway? I thought this was already happening.

157 points by auctiontheory 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

I'm glad I hit refresh and saw that the sensationalist title was edited, but even without that I think this article is a bit over the top. What they're doing is simple- * Building more direct connections between themselves and other countries, to reduce the amount of traffic going through the US. * Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens. * Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying. It's not surprising, and it's certainly not going to balkanize the internet. What it could do is cost US companies a ton of money in lost revenue as services move out of the country.

spacebe4time 13y ago
> * Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens. And it would allow them to collect data of their own citizens much easier. Because, ya know, it's just America is a totalitarian boogie-man. All other countries are bunch of human rights loving, tree hugging fluffy bunnies.
r00fus 13y ago
Going by your summary, this is plain common sense. And I think the Internet will be stronger for it. Viva la Brasil
- cfontes 13y ago
  Thanks. I don't want to sound as an asshole but... "Viva la Brasil" - is spanish and should be "Viva el Brasil" And we speak Portuguese the correct would be "Viva o Brasil" And looks like it's impossible to do this without sounding like an asshole, sorry for that.
  - wulczer 13y ago
    BTW, I think at least in Peninsular Spanish you'd say "Viva Brasil" (omitting the article).
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - mattlutze 13y ago
    Perhaps not interestingly, Google seems to think it's roughly proper Esperanto.
  - ralmeida 13y ago
    Maybe parent was doing some intertextual joke with Guevara's phrase "Viva la revolución"? Something like: http://9gag.com/gag/47152 http://9gag.com/gag/47152 http://www.juicycouture.com/accessories-fragrance-viva-la-juicy http://www.juicycouture.com/accessories-fragrance-viva-la-ju... http://www.vivalacake.com/ http://www.vivalacake.com/ http://vivalaandroid.spreadshirt.com/ http://vivalaandroid.spreadshirt.com/
- anxiousest 13y ago
  How exactly is fracturing the Internet and stopping the free flow of information will make it "stronger"? any sort of amplified indignation about the NSA is a red herring, Brazil had that plan for a long time and now and they are using the NSA as an excuse to accelerate it, and ironically their main reason is to enable more extensive local surveillance: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/actualidad/1376172139_847597.html http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...
  - informatimago 13y ago
    Adding links between nodes is not fracturing a network, on the contrary. The strongest network is the full graph, where each node is connected to each other node, and it's also the network where it's hardest to spy communications, because they always occur directly between peers. On the contrary, the weakest network is the star network, which is basically a tree, with a central point (or a few central points) where all communications must pass thru, and where it is easy to collect all of them. With the Internet as it is built (by commercial ISP and country-wide communication monopolies), it is star shaped, and when you send a packet from Marseille to Barcelona, it goes in the best case, thru Paris and Madrid (where French and Spanish spies can copy it), and often it may even go thru Amsterdam and London (where the British, and therefore the NSA can copy it too). This is not good. And privacy apart, it makes for a brittle network, since breaking a couple of main trunks (eg. a link between Paris and London and a link between Paris and Madrid), would prevent anybody from Marseille to communicate with Barcelona. At all levels, increasing the meshing of the Internet is a good thing: add direct links with your neighbors, have your city establish direct links with neighboring cities, and of course, have your country establish direct links with neighboring countries, instead of going thru a central point in a potentially or manifestly hostile country (even if their private companies pledged to do no evil, they're still under the jug of the evil country).
    - zero_intp 13y ago
      There are MRS-MIL and LYS-ZRH fiber paths to protect the Iberian peninsula. A PAR-MAD cut does not bring down ONO or any of the other Iberian providers. Additionally, PAR-LON has more than one path, any backbone provider worth their weight will use both. Also, PAR-FRA-AMS-LON or PAR-AMS-LON are viable alternative paths should all LON-PAR paths be cut.
throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
"Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil," The language in the article is "compels".
- kroger 13y ago
  "Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil" I hope they change how hosting and domain registration work in Brazil. I gave up registering .br domains because the way it works in Brazil is very obtuse. There's a centralized register (registro.br), their web site is stuck in 1995 (you can't change data easily, etc), and you can't register a domain for more than a year at a time (you have to renew every year).
  - soneca 13y ago
    Well, I used Registro.br and GoDaddy a few times and think Registro.br is much, much easier. And, yes, you can register for more than a year. Hosting on the other hand is terrible. Expensive and unreliable and with an awful customer service.
    - dspillett 13y ago
      I wouldn't use GoDaddy as a "good" example to compare other services to!
      - jebblue 13y ago
        GoDaddy is easy to use, clear, their prices broke me free from Network Solutions' high prices, they are a top domain registrar.
        dspillett 13y ago
        I've not touched them for some time having moved all the domains I used to have through them elsewhere (mainly due to opinions I have of them as a company than any technical issues as a registrar) so things may have changed. Back when I did have domains registered through them I found the interface to be very busy and cluttered, full of opportunities to be upsold to, and there was not way of just registering a domain without actively saying no to a small pile of upselling related questions. I remember setting up private name servers being relatively hasslesome too (possible, but the options not obviously easy to find). I think I pay a few cents (maybe even tens of cents, oh! the humanity!) per domain per year extra elsewhere (or did at the time of the move IIRC, I've not compared prices recently) but that isn't exactly going to break the bank for those I still bother to not let expire. > they are a top domain registrar They are certainly a popular registrar with a large customer base. Opinions on them being a top registrar vary widely especially as "top" could mean many things! But as I've not used them for a while I can't judge on technical matter or their current UI, I'll have to defer to you judgement on that. Other things would stop me ever moving back though.
talles 13y ago
What was the title by the way?
kassner 13y ago
"Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying." I have to laugh about the government asking their "USPS" to do this.
dspillett 13y ago
Assuming Brazil's government thinks like any other, "so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens" probably means "so we can enforce our laws allowing us to spy on you (by knowing your private keys or such), but other countries can't (unless an appropriately rich entity pays the right people for access to said keys". For proper privacy we need to implement it ourselves, unfortunately there are laws being written to ban that sort of thing for national security reasons.

r0h1n 13y ago

While it's great that countries around the world are belatedly waking up to the fact that the US wields a disproportionate amount of influence on the Internet, which it also uses to shore up its strategic military or commercial objectives, as users we ought to distrust any other country just as much as the US. IMHO Catch-all Internet surveillance is a drug that no country's intelligence or law-enforcement apparatus can stay away from. I'm based in India and am under no illusion that my government - given the chance or the technical capability - will attempt to secretly monitor its own citizens in a manner far worse than possibly the US. So while I distrust the US, I also distrust India when it comes to any kind of "control" over the Internet. And so I hope, will Brazilians. As users we ought to take our own independent and personal choices on how best to safeguard our online lives.

alan_cx 13y ago
Does India "render" people"? The difference is the USA acts across the planet, insisting its laws apply to all the world, applying its mockery of a justice system to the majority who never voted for it. What goes on in India is for Indians. As a Brit I have no fear of Indian justice. US "justice" and attitudes scare the crap out of me.
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Yes, India does occasionally "render" alleged terrorists. But usually from bordering and smaller countries like Nepal. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-30/india/41617686_1_yasin-bhatkal-mumbai-serial-blasts-terror-attacks http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-30/india... http://syednazakat.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-inside-story-of-india%E2%80%99s-biggest-anti-terrorism-operation-abroad/ http://syednazakat.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-inside-story... Of course it is nowhere near the reach of the US, so yes, your overall point is still valid. But I fear we're conflating two different issues here - Internet surveillance and illegal rendering. Just because some countries may not be doing the latter doesn't mean we as users should be blase about the former.
- galvanist 13y ago
  Yes, let's look to the British to tell us how a country should keep to its borders, handle international relations, balance domestic surveillance/privacy concerns, run fair and impartial international trials, and teach us about India.

cfontes 13y ago

My country never fails to embarrass me. Brazil is the world leader in saying that it's going to do something awesome and completely forgetting about doing something in order to make that happen. Nothing is going to happen. Example: In order to have a seat in one of the trips to the international space station, Brazil should develop and build some of the windows of it. We didn't and not because we don't know how, it was because of politics. In order to make it appear that we didn't fail to the population, the president bought a X million dollars flight ticket to a random guy that today earns money by giving speeches about how dreams come true with hard work and that you can become an astronaut just like him. The biggest part of the population thinks we earned it by doing something useful for the mission. I can go on and on about this events if you need more. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/world/americas/08rio.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/world/americas/08rio.html?... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Space_Agency#International_Space_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Space_Agency#Internat... p.s: look the schedules for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics and you have a second example.

feuteston 13y ago
+1
juusto 13y ago
Oh I know your type... My countrymen never fail to embarrass me. Brazil the world leader in creating the nag-a-lot-people. </irony>
- cfontes 13y ago
  I am just coming to a conclusion based on past facts, call that whatever you like.
harrytuttle 13y ago
Thanks for telling the truth :) As a UK resident, we're knee deep in this sort of crap as well.
- 13y ago

kostyk 13y ago

Go Brazil!

antocv 13y ago

The balkanization of the internet is inevitable, now that we have two push forces towards that, a strong desire to stay away from other countries intelligence agencies and copyright.

mattlutze 13y ago
This is my concern as well. It's somewhat inevitable that the Internet will end up politically divided. The boundary-less state the fledgling has had was, in American historical corollary, the great western expansion. Eventually though structure, regulation and political boundaries are inserted by institutions designed to do those things. Brasil building more connections to the rest of the world is a good thing for global infrastructure. Diversity and multiplicity is awesome. It'll be disappointing once they start tuning their national boundary firewalls and routers to avoid or block services and end up cutting N America out of S America (presuming Chile, Argentina etc. will start moving toward a Brasil-supplied internet).
- antocv 13y ago
  The history with an open and free for all internet that we have enjoyed does inspire me, it is somewhat amazing in retrospect that it was so, despite not having an international organization to defend these principles. The fact that it happened, perhaps due to those ideas of freedom to share knowledge and connect with each other over wast distances and boundaries, makes me believe it will happen again, in another form. We will find each other, just like we did on bbs, irc and in various in-game chats and forums, perhaps next time in a field of ciphers, stenography and darknets, small lights of communities will spring up. Next stop, hyperboria.

znowi 13y ago

> break from US-centric Internet This is in part what the delegates tried to accomplish during the "infamous" ITU summit last year. But Google et al launched a major FUD campaign to Save the Internet, when in reality it was to save American interests and keep control over the net.

msh 13y ago
Well, the proposal was no better that what the americans are doing. I am not from the US but if I have the choice between being the internet being run by the US or china/russia plus a bunch of other dictatorships I will go with the US (but I still abhor the NSA surveillance). Of cause, I would prefer a better option where there was a system that was not dominated by any countries but I dont see the ITU proposal as being good for the internet.

throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago

"Brazil's wiretapping mania is a holdover from the country's 20-year dictatorship[...] The president of the Supreme Court, who believes he also was spied on, called police methods totalitarian. In September, Brazil's president suspended the head of the spy agency over allegations that it eavesdropped on officials." [2008] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122331824781908463.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122331824781908463.html "Eavesdropping incidents are not new. A decade ago a presidential conversation was caught when the office of the national development bank was bugged while the Telebrás phone company was being privatised, presumably so that a bidder could gain an advantage over rivals. Other incidents have occurred since, suggesting that Abin agents and phone-company employees can all too easily be bribed." http://www.economist.com/node/12060388 http://www.economist.com/node/12060388

nwh 13y ago

I'd make a comment about how I was trying to keep my data in my own country, but I'm not, Australia is happily going along with PRISM. It's not even reported in the news here.

pizza234 13y ago

This poses a very interesting psychological problem. Assuming the NSA is the bully of the situation, I wonder if the fact that the rest of the world will (hopefully) claim more and more independece, will lead NSA to back up and have a more reasonable position, or will cause it (and the government that backs it) to have a more and more bullier attitude position. After what happened, it's clear that the guys running it have a god-like image of theirselves, and I doubt that within this perspective, one would cast at least some doubt over his actions.

devx 13y ago

This is what US overreach in spying has led to, and probably more will follow Brazil in doing this soon, and I can't blame them. Hopefully the US government will realize that greed and lust for power aren't always good things, and can sometimes lead to very bad things, and the opposite of what they were expecting to get (breaking the camel's back and all that).

edoloughlin 13y ago

a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments One could argue that it would be a 'dangerous' second step.

guspe 13y ago

>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better." This is interesting. If Internet did really follow a free-for-all model, NSA would've never happened. In the same way free market benefits U.S. but takes its toll on Rwanda, the "free-for-all" internet of today benefits the Silicon Valley at the expense of the privacy of non-american people. If the United States had already taken measures to inhibit NSA's surveillance instead of justifying its actions and chasing Snowden, Brazil wouldn't have to move in that direction. It's basically U.S. unwillingness to build a truly free Internet that pushes other countries towards "independence". We should also be aware that the source of the news is a San Francisco-based newspaper, which adds yet another layer of enconomic interests to the story.

siphr 13y ago

I have been thinking about this for a good few years now and I think the idea has some value however it comes at a cost. What makes internet so good is its population. It is the population of the entire world without borders and immigration control. You can talk to anyone and approach anyone or at least you have the ability to. Knowledge rules and it is directly propotional to the number of people available on the internet. Once nations start going down the track of setting up virtual borders (believe this is what this would lead to), all flow of information will be condemned as it is in the real world. A national network would be used in making solid cases for embargos and sanctions against people and their knowledge, which they were at full liberty to share and disclose as they saw fit. Surely this is not currently at the scale of Great Firewall of China, however, it can easily become that. Consider this move as the first brick. Surely internet surveilance exists and anybody who thought it wasn't ever since its creation was either stupid or indifferent to the idea. The difference between then and now is that we have proof of this. A nation isolating itself into a pocket of its own internal communication network will not solve this problem. I personally think that it is a step back not a step forward. I believe TOR had the right idea but it is no silver bullet. People of Brazil might think that this is a good thing but rest assured all that would change is they'd be transitioning from global internet surveillance to local internet surveillance.

HugoDias 13y ago

I live in Brazil and nothing going to happen, trust me. Next.

forinti 13y ago

>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better." I find it rather annoying that everything that the current Brazilian government does gets labeled as "socialist" or "soviet" or something along those lines. Isn't having the NSA spying on everyone what you would expect of the KGB? So why can't Brazil take measures to protect its interests?

scardine 13y ago
There is no privacy in Brazil, you have to put your fingerprints in a database for having an ID card or driver license issued. Biometric access is being enforced for voting and a lot of other trivial citizenship exercises. There is no doubt that the PT party ("workers party" in Portuguese) has a leftist doctrine that is a mix of "Chavismo" and ancient "soviet" crap that is out of fashion even in Russia. The only reason Brazil is not as trashed as Venezuela is that Brazilian press and other civilian institutions are a little stronger. Lula (the former president) and Dilma (his puppet and actual president) endorse some of the worst dictatorships governments in the world. Lula even endorsed nut jobs like Ahmadinejad from Iran. The EUA gives these clowns as a "friendly government" label for lack of a better term. Brazil is not a democracy, it is a dumbocracy.
- forinti 13y ago
  I can never tell if these rants are meant to be taken seriously.
  - jebblue 13y ago
    It didn't read like a rant to me, what did you read from scardine's comment that made you feel it could be perceived as a rant? Perhaps it was some venting, but that's all.
  - PauloManrique 13y ago
    Telling the truth is "rant"? I'm amazed that the international community didn't noticed we are importing slaves from Cuba.

rodolphoarruda 13y ago

The root cause of all this is the leaked document about a possible backdoor installed within Petrobras IT infrastructure. Since this company has a lot of employees at high/strategic positions nominated directly by the government, we assume that there is a continued information exchange between them and the government, and that this information is so sensitive it could expose high scale politicians to the media in an uncontrolled way (a situation which the current political party in power tries to avoid at all cost). In short, the government knows there is a lot of dirt under the Petrobras rug, and all those actions we read in the article refers to putting heavy furniture on top of it.

PauloManrique 13y ago
That's true, I really hope Dilma to piss Obama off so he could show us why Petrobras is about to break.

PauloManrique 13y ago

"Brazilians are among the most voracious consumers of social media, ranking No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube." While I'm afraid of president's real will, I can't stop thinking about, if we are 3 on FB, 2 on Twitter and Youtube then why not host some of the data here? We got a huge ping delay to those company servers anyway.

tonylemesmer 13y ago

So what's to stop the NDA / GCHQ hiring moles to put trojans inside these networks / organisations and getting the info anyway? I thought this was already happening.