Brazil Announces Plans To Move Away From US-Centric Internet 285
trbdavies writes "The Associated Press reports: 'President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google. The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month's scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner.' Among Brazil's plans are a domestic encrypted email service, laying its own fiber optic cable to Europe, requiring services like Facebook and Google to store data generated by Brazilians on servers located in Brazil, and pushing for 'international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software during the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month.'"
ballsy move (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ballsy move (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Brazilian, I have to say this is just the typical "full of hot air" attitude of the current government.
I don't expect anything more than some noise and a couple news flashes to come out of this. And a lot of wasted public money, probably being spent on companies owned by political cronies.
This is the same president that published an executive order (has force of law) that changed our language to include a female inflection for the word "president" (which was a non gender specific word, to begin with)
Re:ballsy move (Score:5, Insightful)
Every major government right now is doing some serious inspections of where is their data flowing through, where is it stored and how trusty are the interests of those who control them... And you can bet they are not liking the answers they are getting.
Re:ballsy move (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. A similar thing happened in Finland a few years ago. The previously state-run mobile phone and internet provider was sold to a Swedish company and as a result, the hub for all the data flowing into and out of this provider moved to Sweden. The problem was, the Finnish government used this provider, and suddenly all government data was "overseas". This was/is illegal. So, they had to quickly build new datacenters in Finland to host all the government data. I would also speculate that Sweden's close ties with the US had some impact to the urgency as well.
Note, this was well before the whole Assange affair which also seems to smell of US interference/cooperation with the Swedish government in order to get him on Swedish soil so he can be extradited to the US for prosecution.
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As a Brazilian I agree. This is just political speech (a.k.a "BS"). Telebras, the "the state-run telecom company" is a skeleton company, brought back to life from the remnants of the archaic public telecom system to serve political interests. It brings Internet access to about 260 cities, out of 5570 on the country, most of all in sparse populated areas (http://www.telebras.com.br/cidades_com_oferta_PNBL_pela_Telebras_e_parceiros_ordem_alfabetica.pdf). Also the compel for Facebook, Google, etc "to store d
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Its a great thing to decentralize from the US. BUT, it could just as easily mean more fragmentation. Just like China has the Great Firewall, Brazil could as easily make you swim the Great River Amazon. No I don't expect them to, but nothing says they can't. And worse, if more countries follow, more fragmentation of the same could make navigating the internet as bad as in the days of dial-up.
Or, you could get the UN and ITU thinking they know how to govern and make it all one big happy bureaucratic world
Re:ballsy move (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots more international fibre might be a good thing rather that treating the US as a passive hub.
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Lots more international fibre might be a good thing rather that treating the US as a passive hub.
My doctor says I should eats lots more fibre, but the international part kinda violates the greenie mantra of "buy local", doesn't it?
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Actually, that would be a casus belli for a war against America on the part of Brazil if an undersea cable was tapped into by a 3rd party government. It is not as that has never happened before [wikipedia.org] even against countries openly hostile to America. It is doubtful that physical cables would be laid from the splice all of the way back to America though.... but who knows if you are making stuff up here? Thousands of miles of additional cable from that splice to America would still be quite the investment with Br
Re:ballsy move (Score:5, Insightful)
It wouldn't hurt for Brazil to have more physical connections with other Latin American countries as well as other countries relatively near, such as perhaps a direct link to South Africa and Spain/Portugal (aka something across the Atlantic). Unfortunately west Africa isn't exactly an economic hot spot in the world and would be the easiest to reach.
What I don't understand is why you or anybody else is worried about "fragmentation" on this issue? Fragmentation of IP addresses? I thought IPv6 pretty much solved that problem anyway (with enough address space so every person can have thousands of IP addresses and still have room left over for governments and corporations). Routers can do a pretty good job of finding network addresses in even a very fragmented world infrastructure as that is sort of why they were invented in the first place. Network traffic certainly doesn't need to go into America first.
The "bad old days of dial up access" was mostly an issue of finding an ISP in your neighborhood.... which was eventually solved with pools of dial up access and then widespread DSL coverage. If you are complaining about bandwidth, I hardly think that is going to be a problem with additional links and physical connections between people in more distant parts of the world from the primary corridors of telecommunications. If anything, bandwidth will improve if peripheral edges of networks are connected as well as improving reliability. Fragmentation actually improves things as opposed to making it worse.
Perhaps you are complaining about fragmentation of services like more kinds of websites that are "portals". Would it be a bad thing if those services are broken up and people use things other than Google's gmail?
Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
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And if they can trust one another to setup their own development bank [wikipedia.org] and stop using the US dollar as a trade medium [wikipedia.org], they should be able to sort the matter of routers easily.
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Technically yes, a PC can act as a router. However scaling such a system to accommodate the required tier 1 connectivity would be impossible.
Won't stop the US, much less the NSA. (Score:4, Insightful)
At any point in that chain, the US can still snoop or put US-friendly people/technology in place.
and all of the places you are connecting to (Score:4, Informative)
are outside Brazil, such as the United States, because beside a small collection of servers you want to call secure and local (Brazil's own webmail server, for instance) everything else is "out there". Including most of the "Brazillian content" such as info about the Rio '16 Olympics and all those hot photos of women at Carnivale.
(addenum) (Score:2)
also wanted to add: Learn from China, Brasil, that while you can go at it alone, your people will still go under the wall for what they're looking for.
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The article is kinda vauge but AIUI they are talking about forcing american companies to store data about brazillians in brazil. Well that raises a few issues.
1: what are they going to do if some of those american companies tell them to go pound sand? Unless the company in question has a direct buisness presense in brazil it seems their choices are to either block connections (the "great firewall soloution) or lets things continue as they are.
2: If the NSA uses a national security letter to order the americ
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No, most content of interest to Brazilians is hosted inside Brazil. Even stuff on US sites is served from CDNs inside the country. Brazilians mostly look at local sites anyway, except for search engines and some social networks, and the government has already said it wants to make sure they keep Brazilian data in Brazil.
It's also a nice way to talk down US sites and products so that Brazilian ones can compete with them, similar to how the US has already banned Chinese telecoms equipment because it's too che
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The U.S. government has banned the use of Chinese telecom equipment by U.S. government agencies not because it is too cheap or too good, but because it is compromised and is used by the People's Liberation Army to spy on the U.S. government. Not that the U.S. government has never done something like that to other countries.
There is no ban on such equipment by ordinary Americans or even American companies. You just can't directly use that stuff if you are involved in government contracts. On the other han
please o please, (Score:2, Funny)
fuck up pings for brazillians playing mmorpgs on u.s. servers.
signed.
the american gamer.
Benders view (Score:5, Funny)
I'll build my own internet! With blackjack! And hookers!
Happening everywhere on all levels (Score:5, Insightful)
Our Global Suction strategy is blowing up in our face. We were perceived as an honest broker, now we're going to find our control increasingly challenged and marginalized. I've been reading more and more about everyone from individual users to companies to now nations basically giving us the finger. Any tactic we're employing with geopolitical repercussions that can be blown out of the water by one disgruntled contractor was woefully conceived.
I don't know what annoys me more; the dragnetting or the fact that they did such a crappy job of keeping it under wraps.
Re:Happening everywhere on all levels (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm astonished at the posts in this thread that have been modded up, but just don't get this point. This is about the only one I've seen so far that is truly insightful. The NSA's dragnetting is why we can't have good things. It will progressively push all other countries to legislate that information on their citizens must be hosted inside their borders. And Brazil's approach is the right one. They won't go after their citizens, or the big bad NSA. They'll just go after the businesses themselves. For companies like Google, this will be an inconvenience, but for any small company wanting to do international business on the internet, their options just evaporated. Here's hoping that they'll get some international law in place to declare the NSAs actions illegal - and some decent penalties applied at a 'per capita' rate.
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Consolidate and fracture (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny thing is, that's how the internet is supposed to be. The only things that are common are the protocols used to communicate between networks. The idea that everything should be consolidated into one system is not in the spirit of the internet. It is the centralized systems that are ripe for abuse by large organizations. As an aside, terrorists operate in cells rather than with a strong command hierarchy for the same reason.
Now, if the Brazilians can design their own microprocessors and switch to a flavor of Linux, they might have a shot at being secure.
Re:Consolidate and fracture (Score:4, Informative)
Dunno about the chips, but the government has been pushing for free software for over a decade now. Personal anecdote: I worked a temp job in a public organization, and all the machines there ran Ubuntu, except for one with Windows XP (no idea why), and a support guy brought his own Macbook.
May I be the first to suggest ipv6? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Afaict most of the major backbone operators and hosting providers have IPv6 available. It's the access providers who are dragging their heels and that doesn't really affect whether international IPv6 traffic goes through the US or not.
I called it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust in anything connected with the US is done. Other governments and other people are VERY aware of what the US influence has been doing. They are also very aware that Brazil's financial systems didn't crash because they didn't do what the rest of the world did. A lot of things aren't being talked about but the leaders know what's what but they don't know how to escape the net which the powers behind the US have put over everyone else. BRIC will make the changes the rest of the world will be inclined to follow.
I never thought there would be a year of Linux on the desktop, but something like it is becoming more and more possible in other nations.
Things are changing and they're going to change a lot more before it's done.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks again Snowden. You woke up the world and it's changing for the better because of you.
Dear Facebook.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook: No.
BRAZIL: Well, then we will just prevent all our citizens from accessing your website...
Facebook: Darn.
Re:Dear Facebook.... (Score:5, Informative)
Right. Just like how every time Google has been threatened with having local regulations applied to them in France or Germany or what have you, the for-profit corporation writes off the countries involved and pulls up shop.
Unless they, you know, cave. Which is pretty much every time.
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Should provide a nice boost to Orkut :)
They can go after Facebook for any business they're doing in Brazil, that is, taking advertisements.
When will extradictions begin? (Score:2)
Considering how US asks for extradiction of people who were hacking US networks, are they gonna extradite NSA employees that have broken countless laws and hacked networks in many other countries?
I mean, will people be able to not start manically laughing next time USA asks for someone to be extradited because he/she broke some US law and/or hacked some US system(s)?
I know I'll be rolling on the floor.
People still don't see what's wrong (Score:2)
What really amazes me is how many people boldy say "I am ok with NSA spying", yet somehow they completely ignore that NSA personnel is breaking local and foreign laws.
Breaking into corporate/private networks and stealing sensitive data, which is a heavy crime in almost every 'modern' country. Crime for which US pressures other countries, to extradite their own citizens. To extradite them to the country that is the biggest cyber criminal in the world. Ooooh, the irony.
Are you really ok with that?
Brazil: take Snowden (Score:2)
Symptom (Score:2)
Require google and facebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
Requiring foreign companies to host data on servers inside brazil isn't going to achieve anything... They are still foreign corporations, and will be able to access those servers and/or copy data off them at any time they want.
What's really needed, is instead of large centrally controlled services like facebook there should be a large number of distributed but openly interoperable services.
This is how the internet has always worked, and how core services like web and email work - anyone can run their own servers, and anyone's servers can talk to anyone else's. If you are worried about foreign spies, you can ensure that you use services operated in countries you trust.
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This. Mod parent up, please.
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A large number of smaller sites (than Facebook) has a lower value than Facebook due to network effects.
What happens when you look at the Internet as just another commodity? Would Brazil want the US to create legislation to ensure that all planes flown in US airspace must be made in the US?
Today's 'lucky' ten thousand... (Score:2)
I guess she's one of them [xkcd.com].
Unfortunately, this is a much less delightful revelation...and, well, she's Brazilian not American...but c'mon lady.
It won't help. (Score:2)
I don't think the Brazilians understand that the US can do this to the North Koreans and they have as much their own internet as anyone.
This has nothing to do with the NSA (Score:5, Interesting)
Brazilian here. It has to do with censoring what people post on facebook.
Recently, there have been waves of protests in Brazil, where all the traditional media companies - newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV - barely took notice even though at some instances there were almost one million people screaming outside. The reason they are so biased is because they are being bought by the government, in a monthly basis, where Rede Globo, the Brazilian equivalent of BBC, takes half the money and the rest is distributed to the other smaller media outlets. That's taxpayer money we are talking about - rampant corruption is one of the main points of these protests.
The only way that these protests gained wide support was through facebook events. Since Dilma has no control over facebook, she could not censor it. Hence, the excuse to store all brazilian data in brazilian servers: so that she and her government can put a stop to the riots.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that. They are just mad they don't have a piece of the action.
Regardless of their ability to spy on their own people I think this is a good thing and I say that as a red, white and blue American citizen. I don't like that we control the whole ball of wax. Its time other countries stepped things up and built on what the US started. The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
The Internet isn't supposed to be tied to country at all.
Oddly, I agree with Eric Schmidt on this - the big risk is if every country starts making their own internet fiefdom and it becomes harder to operate and connect internationally. Of course Eric Schmidt said this, as one of the companies responsible for helping with the spying he's worried about the ripple effects from.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't think of it as a fiefdom, think of it as a jobs program for Brazil's tech sector. If the big players want a piece of the Brazilian market, and I think they probably do, then they have to have a physical presence there. Ditto the fiber connections to Europe. That has the added effect of making the Internet itself more robust. More transatlantic bandwidth is better, period.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. A physical presence? No, they just need a VPN service in country so it LOOKS like they are there. Isn't that what all the users do so that it looks like they are in Canada and can watch all the curling events that aren't allowed outside of Canada? Or maybe that was TV shows that aren't allowed outside of the US. But anyway, Google and Facebook can just rent a nice, fast, VPN service in country and they will have a presence there as far as these politicians will ever know.
This is Brazil we're talking about -- the politicians might not know, but their tech advisors will -- it's trivial to trace where the bulk traffic to sites like Google and Facebook is being routed. They'll actually need to set up a datacenter there. Management has no need to be in the country, but the data sure does. If that data goes to a VPN and then is routed out of the country to the US, that'll show up in the routing logs (traffic in = encrypted traffic out, and vice versa).
That kind of thing would likely work in many countries, but Brazil has been intentionally beefing up their tech sector over the last decade, and now they generally know what they're doing (and what their citizens are doing).
Interestingly, Facebook Brazil is based out of Ireland, not the US; where the actual data is stored, I have no idea -- but I bet Brazil does.
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So Brazil will tap and decrypt all internet traffic to enforce this rule?
As I said, they have no need to tap and decrypt all internet traffic. All they have to do is get the inbound and outbound router data summaries. If all the country's traffic going TO those servers matches the encrypted data going FROM those servers to some location in the US, and all encrypted traffic FROM those servers in the US matches the traffic coming out from the server, it's pretty obvious that nothing's being stored there. Brazil owns the upstream and downstream routers, so this is trivial to che
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Informative)
So just require certain servers to respond within X milliseconds. The side effect is it'll make some users and gamers happy
You could still be shipping the data elsewhere for the NSA, but the "transactional" servers would still have to be in Brazil. Detecting the data shipping and spying in this case would be harder since the latencies will be low and the byte counts could be a lot less due to filtering, summarization and compression.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
The Internet isn't supposed to be tied to country at all.
Oddly, I agree with Eric Schmidt on this - the big risk is if every country starts making their own internet fiefdom and it becomes harder to operate and connect internationally. Of course Eric Schmidt said this, as one of the companies responsible for helping with the spying he's worried about the ripple effects from.
What Brazil is doing is creating more direct links to other countries instead of having to route through the US. This increases Brazilian privacy, and helps make the the 'net more resilient (and possible faster) for everyone.
It's not about fiefdoms, but about each country being properly connected through their own resources instead of relying on others. It's just in this case there are other benefits to all the extra fibre as well.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe Mr. Schmidt should encourage the US government to stop forcing people into fiefdoms just to have some security.
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The Internet isn't supposed to be tied to country at all.
The internet is whatever it is - there are no universal laws, natural or otherwise, that govern what the internet should be. Other, perhaps, than the simple, physical engineering of it: you can't connect every computer directly to every other computer on the planet, so you do the sensible thing: connect to the ones closest by in a LAN, and connect LANs to a larger, regional network etc. Even without the question of one country spying on another, it is good, common sense to have several, hefty connections be
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Another American here, and I entirely agree. And I don't really mind the NSA spying stuff. I've just always thought that distributing the infrastructure is a good idea - even if that means that parts of it become shady, dangerous places, other parts are run by their governments, etc. Universality is better than monopoly.
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What happens is that the internet gets fractured - you'l
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens is that the internet gets fractured - you'll have the "US Intenret", the "Brazil Internet" just like we have the "Iran Internet", and to a lesser extent, the "China Internet". All little networks running separate and independent.
Or not. TFA says:
A connection from Brazil to Europe, or connections from Brazil to other South American nations, don't constitute a "Brazil internet"; for one thing, the other ends of those connections aren't located in Brazil. If that were sufficient to create a "Brazil internet", there would already be a "US internet" given that the US has an undersea connection to Europe or connections to Canada and Mexico.
It also says:
That wouldn't, in and of itself, mean that Brazilians can't find non-Brazilian sites with Google or that non-Brazilians can't find Brazilian sites with Google; it would mean that Google would have to add one or more data centers in Brazil [google.com] and, for Google searches from within Brazil (presumably meaning "from IP addresses that are located in Brazil"), any information saved about the search would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers (and, presumably, not sent to non-Brazilian servers). It would also mean that Google+ posts from Brazilian users would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers, GMail messages for Brazilian users' accounts would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers, etc. (and, presumably, not sent to non-Brazilian servers).
Today the internet is bigger than any one country - even the NSA can't tap all of it, and it's likely the stuff they tapped they did things like running TOR exit nodes and monitored the data that way.
But tomorrow, the internet will shrivel up (hey, we don't need IPv6 anymore!) as every country runs its own version of the internet, and wanting to connect to the bigger part around it well, you're a terrorist.
I haven't seen anything to indicate that Brazil doesn't want to allow packets to enter or leave Brazil - quite the contrary, in fact, if they want additional connections to countries outside Brazil. That's what would be involved in "each country [running] its own version of the internet".
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I don't like that we control the whole ball of wax.
In reality we don't. That is part of the problem. And we are no worse/better than anyone else. We just got caught with our hand in the jar, that everyone else is pulling cookies out of too.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that.
Well, yes and no. The main thing to worry about is typified by this comment:
Among Brazil's plans are a domestic encrypted email service
It's possible that what this means is that Brazil's domestic email service will do the encryption. This would be no security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email. And possibly sell it to interested customers, such as the US government.
If they're serious about local security, what they'll do is study various end-to-end email encryption packages, and recommend the best ones to their citizens. End-to-end encryption is the only way to get actual security in email. And they'll want a public education campaign to teach people about the "gotchas". For example, you don't ever store your keys in "the cloud".
There have been proposals in the US that email encryption be done by the low-level IP software. This was rejected back in the 1960s by the ARPAnet folks (the military predecessor to the Internet), on the grounds that low-level encryption is inherently secure, since it's typically installed in a way that the user can't control or even see into. It could easily be sending your keys and/or decrypted email to arbitrary third parties, and most users would have no way of knowing about it.
Anyway, it could be interesting to know what the Brazilian planners are planning. Are they really aiming for a domestic email service that "handles" the encryption (i.e., no security at all)? Or are they planning to actually do it right?
Here in the US, we know the answer to that question as applied to our own government (and telecom companies ;-). Is the Brazilian government any better?
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FTFY. The game theory matrices are completely different for capabilities routinely exploited or just held in reserve.
Such an approach would shift the risk profile from ad hoc to systemic. The major surveillance powers actually do manage not to blab everything they intercept onto public networks, which is is not guaranteed with ad hoc interception. There's that wo
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It's possible that what this means is that Brazil's domestic email service will do the encryption. This would be no security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email.
right.
and honestly, i'd rather my data is owned by google than some government. google might mine data from my use of google services, but there's no upside in it for them to use the data against me. they just want me happily spending money. sure, apparently the NSA can get at that data by coercing google, but at least it's indirect access and i assume there's some sort of audited procedure that happens when the NSA demands access to something.
National Stupid Agency (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for shitting in the pool, NSA.
Re:National Stupid Agency (Score:5, Interesting)
every government that has the means is spying on its citizens and other other countries. while the US is probably in the top 5 when it comes to means, it is also more likely to get outed, because whistle blowers are given a platform and do not fear being "disappeared" for their actions.
surprise, you don't see whistle blowers from china, russia, and the like.
Re:National Stupid Agency (Score:5, Insightful)
So is ok that US does it to all the world because other countries maybe doing it?
Even if the other countries, at most, and the ones that does it, does mostly in their own population or internal connections (and for those, how many started shortly after the arab spring? if some external power is social engineering a revolution is better to be aware of it). US not only does that on all the world, their citizens and all the foreing ones that are within their reach (and not just the ones that are connecting in that moment with US servers), but also is getting ready to fire cyberattacks on critical structure [schneier.com].
They are shitting, pissing, and puking in the pool. They don't just they spy, force manufacturers to put backdoors in their products and plant logical timebombs in all other countries critical infrastructure, but they are forcing other countries to protect themselves. If over that, those governments does their own quote of surveillance, is anyway a small drop in the ocean that the US is doing.
Re:National Stupid Agency (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you serious? Does it mean that Assange may leave the Ecuadorean embassy, Manning did not have to spend almost a year "under Prevention of Injury status", Snowden does not have to fear torture when he get's back to US and the whole Patriot act and FISA court did not happen? What a relief!
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Wow, you're 1/3 native amerindian, 1/3 european, and 1/3 smurf? That's quite a mix.
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I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world ....
We didn't -- read up on Internet History [wikipedia.org]. The original research was done by the UK, USA, and France, then individual countries around the world began building their separate networks & opening them to the public (often via commercial services), then joined up with other networks in their region, their regional networks joined others in that part of the world, and once all parts of the world were finally inter-connected, it met the decade-plus old definition of "an Internet."
supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
Where on Earth are you getti
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that. They are just mad they don't have a piece of the action.
Well, they could just be trying to imply that they didn't have a piece of the action. Like the Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, etc.. all acted shocked and appalled until it came out that their people were cooperating and collaborating with the US Agencies.
At least Brazil in this case appears to have some intestinal fortitude. The others I listed are just praying the stories all go away and maintaining business as usual.
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At least Brazil in this case appears to have some intestinal fortitude.
Brazil, as a whole, seems rather uninterested in the matter. The Brazilian leader is making hay while the sun shines, as the saying goes. While the concept is interesting, the truth is that once a packet leaves your own wires you have no real control over where it goes.
This is the same kind of action that Brazil took in response to the US creation of a VISA processing fee. Brazil was quite up-front in admitting that their fee of the same amount was a direct response to the US fee for Brazilian citizens go
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I agree with you. I was merely pointing out that Brazil may not be innocent in the NSA spying ring. As far as we know they are, but a few of those countries on the list of collaborators (like Germany) I did find rather disturbing.
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Not every state is obsessed with spying on its citizens. Most, but not all.
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that. They are just mad they don't have a piece of the action.
You are an idiot and you don't realize that NSA has been intercepting SMS messages (by means of breaking into mobile operator network(s) in Brazil) of Brazilian president. And probably much more (other targets were not named).
Where does that fit into?
War on terror? War on child pornography, perhaps?
Intercepting Brazilian oil company mails/traffic is required in order to fight... terrorism?
Americans still do not understand the consequences of their actions (well, NSA's and government actions). People have given their trust to US government and their agencies, and USA has betrayed them at all possible levels.
USA has now publicy said that they are ok with what NSA has been doing - things that USA themselves consider to be 'acts of war'.
I presume now everyone else will consider it to be okay too.
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This is plain vanilla sort of spying. Most of it has nothing to do with criminal activity. But it does have to do with the US government not being surprised. Sometimes it can be used for advantage, but more often not to get caught zigging when we should be zagging.
For instance, being able to listen to the head of state of another government, say Brazil, would give us perspective on decisions. Are Petrobras contracts being influenced by internal politics or as part of a deal with another country? Probab
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It's really easy to rob someone on the street. You just hit hit the guy on the head with a bat from behind and take his wallet.
With some skill and a different technique, you can take his wallet without him noticing.
The point is, is it OK to do that?
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Re:Well, obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
Per NPR this morning, she cancelled it because she was pissed. As in not rescheduling it. That's about as big a slap in the face as a diplomat can get.
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It's not meant to accomplish anything.
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No. It's not *meant* to accomplish anything. It's pure political grandstanding.
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It will accomplish greater redundancy and greater throughput.
Re:Efficacy? (Score:4, Informative)
did it say in the story that they would move the datacenters into europe?
besides, unless they got shadow cabling they're not going to send all the data over to usa from europe.. which is what usa gets now when the data is routed through them.
another article said vladivostok for cable end, too.
and heh, this does accomplish money into brazil. by forcing facebook, google etc. to store the data in brazil they have to build datacenters into brazil.
Re:Efficacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA showed a "BRIC" fiber (Brazil, Russia, India, China) which would take a Southern route from Brazil to South Africa, India, China and Russia.
It will be good to have more connectivity and alternative routes. It also avoids Miami and the NSA where all of Brazil's data goes now.
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Re:Brazil is like the U.S. in the '50s (Score:5, Funny)
> "Leave It To Beaver"
The didn't call them Brazilians for nothing.
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An up-and-coming, self-righteous, loved and respected (pretty much universally except by its indigenous population) economic dynamo with its first Olympics affirming her new stature.
I know Brazilians who are absolutely terrified of how badly Brazil is going to handle the Olympics, and how poorly the incomplete and uncompleted infrastructure is going to perform when scads of people arrive hoping to see sporting events spread out across the entire country.
They are rightly scared that the big O will leave the country with a big black I (eye) in the eyes of the world. It's bad enough that there were mass riots not long ago based, in part, on the money being spent to build Olympic venues
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You have two choices, keep playing the NSA boogeyman card whilst everyone else robs you blind, or get your act together and start doing what you should have been doing to begin with. Blaming the worlds computer security problems on the NSA is a bit like blaming Top Gear for death of old Morris Marina's.
If you're not welcome on the premises, it's still trespassing, whether the door is locked or not.
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Your missing the bloody point. In the zealous desire to make the NSA the world's boogeyman on all things related to computer security the world is forgetting all of the other security issues that is had /before/ the NSA boogeyman.
People are also naively assuming that the NSA is the only agency to go around spying on other countries like that. It only takes a quick google search to reveal spy agencies from just about every nation on earth. Since the Internet is arguably the cheapest and easiest way to gather
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And every country forces companies to put backdoors in their worldwide products, or give them directly the information, and not to tell anyone because is forbidden by secret law? Didn't know that Microsoft or Cisco were following indication of Russia or China government when put those backdoors there. That other (a very few) even try to go in their surveillance outside the borders don't make the NSA a good citizen, and they have definately the upper hand in a lot of areas.
But is ok, sleep in the lion's den
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If you're not welcome on the premises, it's still trespassing, whether the door is locked or not.
Under which criminal code? Trespassing only exists because there's a law in the books that define it. Now name the law book that nations have to abide.
Unless the US signed a treaty with Brazil that say they can't spy on them, it's fair game. I say this is a Brazilian.
Moranic response to story (Score:2)
They aren't talking about building their own gated AOL. RTFA.
So mail.google.com.br should have its servers in Brazil and presumably be subjected to Brazilian oversight. That's not exactly 'turning into North Korea'.
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RTFA, they are also talking about running their own Fiber to Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile they forget that European governments also heavily engage on spying on the Internet. You did RTFA, right?
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Yes, and that means connecting to other countries infrastructure in the naive assumption that those other countries don't do the same things the US does. Thus the point on North Korea as if you rule out all of the other countries that spy there is no one left to connect to but themselves. Your not really naive enough to think that countries other than the US don't spy, are you?
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Essentially, its one corrupt group in conflict with another, while try to maintain public support.
And how is this different from when our mega corps compete with each other and try to cut off each other's air supply - by lowering prices or making certain things free?
I can't see anything bad coming out of this. I hope more countries do this such that the cost to monitor all packets becomes too expensive for the NSA. Then we might have a more free Internet.
tl;dr - the balkanization of spying is a good thing for Internet users.
Just some Randian butthurt thrown in. (Score:2)
Oh noes!!! Wont someone please think of the billionaire o
Re: Good. (Score:2)
Only if Snowden and his supporters fall on it first..
Re:Brazil always answers to USA (Score:4, Interesting)
Brazil has a policy of absolute reciprocity when it comes to immigration. Brazil requires the same of US Residents applying for a Brazilian visa as the US requires of Brazilian Residents applying for a US Visa.
Any requirement imposed upon Brazilian citizens by any other country is reciprocated toward that country's citizens. It makes perfect sense to do it that way.