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Google to Give Data To Brazilian Court
Edu writes to mention a Washington Post article about Google's olive branch to the Brazilian courts. Despite previously refusing to reveal search information to the U.S. government, the company has announced they'll be releasing information on hate groups to the Brazilian courts. The move is intended to allow the Brazilian government to identify users associated with homophobic and racist groups. From the article: "Orkut pulls objectionable words and pictures from user sites, but Google stores content it feels could be useful in a lawsuit. Orkut is especially popular in Brazil, which accounts for 75 percent of its 17 million users. Legal and privacy experts said that Google had no choice but to comply with the court order. 'From the law enforcement perspective, if the records are in the possession of the business, the business can be compelled to produce them,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center."
Show the world that Big Brother, Fascism and Censorship know no Left/Right wing ideology!
This is completly different than what the US gov't did. In this case it was a court order that Google was compelled to fulfil. What happened in the U.S. was the government asked google to hand over records, without mentioning the purpose.
"Don't be Evil" was supposed to be the motto of the company. When they stood up to the Bush administration in court and defended it's user searches, I applauded them. Not because they were defending the search data, not because they were defending the people that made the searches, but rather because they were defending the end users *right* to make the search in the first place. Yet, in past months, my view of Google has started to change. Headlines like the one in which their CEO defended their policy of storing search terms (presumably for data mining operations and targeted marketing), and then this event in which they are going to turn over the data to a foreign government. I'm not defending the bad guys in any way here, but what I am saying is that there is going to come a day in the not so distant future in which the searches that you did ten years ago can be brought into question. Who knows? Maybe at somepoint some whacked law maker will make a twinkie illegal, and those searches that you made so that you could distill your own will be akin to taking a walk on the Dark Side. Philip Zimmermann said it best: "If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
I was thinking about this general issue last night and realized the great irony that Brazil and "enlightened" Europe would have to outlaw a lot of South Park episodes because they would offend the sensibilities of some group, typically homosexuals. I'm entirely unimpressed with these countries and their "progressiveness" that says that throwing around human sexuality is ok, but saying offensive things is not.
Oh don't even start that bullshit about majorities versus minorities. The minorities are just as bad as the majorities. I've met just as many gays that instantly assume I'm going to want to stone them to death because I'm technically a fundamentalist, as I have met pseudo-Christians who would probably join a mob to stone them. I'm an asshole, they're an asshole. EVERYONE'S AN ASSHOLE on these issues at some point!
You know what breeds hate and resentment? Empowering people to turn subjective feelings into a legal weapon. You instantly empower a hate group the moment you ban it. I bet the KKK would grow 50-100% every year if it were outlawed. It's just a way for societies to brush their issues under the national carpet and pretend that all is well.
Well guess what?! It isn't! All manner of bigotry is rampant around the world and the force of law is not going to change hearts. Law has been used to smooth these things over time and again in the past and it **always** fails. The only thing that changes bigotry into love is a spiritual rebirth and that is something that cannot be legislated.
At least according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil#Government_and _Politics, Brazil is a democracy. This is a choice the people of Brazil made about how they choose to run their society, so not quite the same as the situation in China where the political system raises questions--at least in my mind--about how more than a small set of the population feels about it.
I wouldn't be the least surprised to find out that, if a data cable crosses through a country's territory, that country can follow its own laws on whether or not it can tap the cable, unless its signed a treaty to the contrary. By analogy, it should also be able to follow its own laws on whether to tap the contents of disks located within its jurisdiction. If true, Europeans, for example, may wish to compare U.S. to European privacy laws and think about where the companies they use store their data.
There is de facto legitimization of hacking in some countries, just as there's de facto legitimization of other activities that neighboring countries might consider crimes or civilly punishable activities. For example, a U.S. company that exceeds the Kyoto protocol's emission caps is not liable, nor can the U.S. apply its laws regarding nuclear proliferation to A. Q. Kahn, despite the fact that both activities affect neighboring countries. Whether the activity is punishable in the neighbor country depends on whether there are extradition treaties, "special rendition"-type activities, and the vagaries of international law.
As for the issue some other posters have raised of Google logging all this stuff, one answer is to use one of Google's competitors, avoid Gmail (or any other web-based mail, for that matter), and use anonymizer services when running searches.
Why wouldn't the brazilian agency just say that then, and avoid all the fuss? Incompetence? Or lack of evidence?
Investigating conspiracy-to-commit-murder via Orkut would not generate nearly the same amount of news. Don't places in the US (myspace, etc) roll over with this information all the time?
So Paul knows what the "arsenokoite" term means. But does he also know what hypokrytos means? (sorry for the Greek spelling, this is not my first language).
And how does Ephesians 5:29 rhyme with 2 Corinthians 12:7 ? Even if we disagree about what that mysterious "thorn" actually is, there seems to be some contradiction between both verses, unless Paul considers himself to be nobody.