The End of Net Anonymity In Brazil

DieNadel writes, "The Brazilian senate is considering a bill that will make it a crime to join a chat, blog, or download from the Internet without fully identifying oneself first. Privacy groups and Internet providers are very concerned, and are trying to lobby against the bill, but it seems they won't have much success." From the article: "If approved, it will be a crime, punishable with up to 4 years of jail time, to disseminate virus or trojans, unauthorizedly access data banks or networks and send e-mail, join chat, write a blog or download content anonymously."

Comments

So many, many ways around this.

[khasim]

First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.

Secondly, there are so many ways around this when you are a criminal. Crack someone else's machine and you can do whatever you want as if you were legally that person. Who stupid is that?

If you're really good, you'd crack 2 machines outside Brazil and use them to bounce traffic around before it got to you. Your machine and record would be 100% clean.

Finally, let's talk wireless. Unless the government wants to crack down on unsecured wireless connections, they're going to lose this one.

This is nothing more than an attempt to scare the good citizens into self-censoring their legal activities. And that is disgusting.

Re:So many, many ways around this.

[Control Group]

First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.

If we paid attention to that logic, we'd have 50% fewer laws than we do.

Not that you're wrong, of course, just that passing laws is how the government proves it's Doing Something, irrespective of wheter the law does anything other than screw the innocent.

And I don't think this varies appreciably from government to government.

Re:As always...

[1u3hr]

Yeah, because someone being in favor of better identification of easy terror targets like airlines, and being in favor of better money tracing, automatically means they are in favor of no privacy in society at all.

Yes, right, despite thinking you're being sarcastic. Because collecting huge amounts of information about legitimate travellers does nothing to stop terrorists. Just look at the No Fly List, that catches every terrorist who books a ticket under his own name (i.e., none) while inconveniencing thousands with similar names. Idiotic security theatre. And how many times must it be pointed out that the 9/11 terrorists mostly had legit IDs and clean records; they would have walked though today's security just as easily, after surrendering their shampoo bottles. Money tracing? Similar profiling goes on here, inconveniencing every poor schmuck trying to send money home to his family, if his name happens to be Mohammed, while the actual terrorists duck the whole system.

All the information needed to predict, and prevent, 911, was already in the US government's hands before the event. They need better, smarter analysis, more people on the ground, not more noise. But that's what bureaucrats know how to do, and that's their solution to every problem.