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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."
...be sure to identify yourself when you distribute trojans!
Lord forbid that someone steals your "government-supplied certificate," or you could be doing some serious time in a Brazilian prison.
First, they came for the Brazillians, but I did not speak up, for I was not of Brazil. ...fill in the rest yourself
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Thank You!
For as many problems as we have in the states (yes, we have a lot), I sure as hell don't want anyone else dictating the rules of the net. If you live outside of the U.S., and feel the same way, create your own "master" DNS and make your own rules. Nothing is stopping you.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Will a 10 years old kid go to trial if he posts anonymously on a forum like slashdot?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Assuming the country also allow freedom to express and identity thief, what is such a bad thing of removing annomity? Yes, I really want to know and read the assumption. So, educate me.
Turn over the Internet to the U.N.?
Oh, I thought they said turn the Internet over to the The Onion. Never mind, then. If hilarity is not going to ensue, then take my name off the petition.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
So, it's a crime to be on the Internet anonymously, but it's not a crime to butcher words in English? :P
"I call murder on that!" -- Smelly Hippy, Futurama
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
"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."
When all Usenet posts are legit I'll believe it.
In other words, the only people this will affect are those who do take precautions to adequately hide themselves, those ignorant of the law, and those where the government just wants to tack on 4 more years!
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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.
Yeah, it would totally suck if a decision like this got stuck in committee for 20 years while 50 different countries' representatives argued over it before it finally got permanently vetoed by China for the express purpose of pissing another country off.
More like it gets approved for the express purpose of pissing the US off, and after the US vetoes it, the rest of the world whines that the US is "forcing their values on the rest of the world."
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm surprised this came up first in brazil; this seems more like something the US or the UK would pass (if we haven't already).
How will they find the identities of the people who post anonymously to prosecute them?
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Mmm, Brazil!
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You have an IP address that response packets are routed to. The server knows that IP address. So does every node routing the traffic on the internet -- every "hop" can see both sender and receiver IP addresses.
A DNS lookup identifies the service provider.
An authorized data access maps the IP address to a service address and possible customer identification. Hopefully this is a rigorously documented and monitored process in your nation.
Anonymizer routing can still be tracked, it just takes more work and some high-powered address correlation hardware. Or a simple but massive gate array, looking for data checksum correlations between streams entering and leaving an anonymizer.
Internet anonymity is illusion.
The only remaining question is whether you stand by your posted opinions, or hide as an anonymous coward.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm from the US, and I know Jack about how the political system in Brazil works, but I did read the article. This is a bill introduced by one crazy senator, Senator Eduardo Azeredo (PSDB-MG). This isn't law and hopefully will never be. I don't think the people of Brazil are this gullible.
What is PSDB-MG, anyway? Piece of Shit Damn British MG?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Freedom can be dangerous when the government harvests what you've done with it. Just get people hooked on something free, like the Internet, and then unilaterally add strict requirements later, that people will "compromise" to accept rather than give up their toy.
Like a drug pusher who tells you "the first bag is free".
Or an ISP, telco or bank which unilaterally changes Terms of Service or privacy "agreements".
--
make install -not war
Well, Google returns 10,800 results... good enough for me :-)
Face it, our beloved language encourages neologisms.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
"will require every ISP to store each connection performed by a user for at least 3 years" In a related story, Brazil announces a massive RFQ from storage vendors.
That's a remarkably depressing idea. Do you have evidence in the form of prior examples of this behavior?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Just like when an office network's filtering software is just a little too strict, the smarter users will proxy their traffic outside. I could see ISP's in Argentina, Venezeula, and elsewhere getting some additional traffic....
That's what they are trying to do:
The bill states that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net, with full name, current address, phone number and the equivalent of the Social Security Number. To access the Net without providing this information, or to give false information, will also be a crime.
Senator Eduardo Azeredo wants to legally recommend every Internet user to buy the government approved certificate, and use it on every connection to the Net.
Ironic - politicians make it an issue to protect children from the Internet, now they are demanding that anyone (including children) using the Internet must give out their personal information including their address and phone number, which is exactly what every parent been told to teach their kids not to do.
How exactly, is this going to work with a family computer - is every person going to have to log out and log back in again, each time someone sits down at the keyboard?
Given that some mobile phones can actually download webpages, you are going to need to store that certificate on your phone. So what if that mobile phone gets stolen?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Is it just me, or is this concept logically inconsistent? If you do something anonymously, then the government isn't going to be able to find you to prosecute you. If you did something in such a way that the government can find you and prosecute you, then it wasn't done anonymously.
Funny, I was under the impression that the US was strong-arming ther rest of the world to give up their privacy, because otherwise THE TERRORISTS WIN. Just look at information airlines and banks have been demanded to hand over to the US govt. Look at the secret, illegal wiretaps Bush has authorised. And you want me to believe the US would block this? The current administration is leading the charge to wipe out privacy.
... sending Spam and junk mail to Brazilians is going to get a whole lot easier! Go get 'em telemarketers!
You could have a background music with your post... Brazil, Brazil....
How is this enforceable? Any site that is access over a secure connection cannot be monitored. Unless they have guilty-until-proven innocent system of justice, of course.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'm not Brazillian, either!
Just look at information airlines and banks have been demanded to hand over to the US govt. Look at the secret, illegal wiretaps Bush has authorised. And you want me to believe the US would block this? The current administration is leading the charge to wipe out privacy.
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.
I hate the "slippery slope" argument. It's stupid and should be added to the list of Logical Fallacies.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
WTFZOMGBBQ? This is a bill that America needs to have. If law-abiding citizens refrained from encryption and anonymizers and onion routers and that sort of thing, the terrorists and drug cartels that need such anonymity to hide from our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would find that much more difficult to do so.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
Morpheus, just assimilate already! The food tastes good here and the ladies are bountiful.
So who are you voting for? Kang or Kodos?
Lets face it, it is just not possible to enforce this kind of law.
With Onion Routing Networks, Mixmaster Type II Anonymous Email, GPG/PGP Type I Anonymous remailers , and bidirectional encrypted anonymous e-mail addresses that can deliver to a news group
Add to this the use of unsecured 802.11 networks and there is just no way to stop a person that truly wants to be anonymous on the internet.
Unfortunately most do not know how to use them, so most of the internet is only sudo-anonymous.
How can this law be enforced without massive repression? Whatever the law is, it must to allow media to quote someone without naming them. If you ban news organizations from making quotes without precise verifiable sources, you eliminate any semblance of a free press and a free society. Can't users just enter into a confidentiality agreement with a media source? The Internet user identifies themselves to the media entity, tells them the information that they want to post, and the media posts it with a generalized source, like a "woman from the estado (state) of Roraima".
If someone is truly anonymous, the government won't be able to find them. To stop anonymity, you must ban every service provider and user that enables others to be anonymous. Does this law ban any technology that could lead to anonymity? If so, doesn't that basically ban every protocol used on the Internet (you can tunnel, proxy, and relay over http, ssh, any p2p system, etc)? It seams like this law is practically useless, but may be provided as an additional punishment for criminals. So if you break the law online, and use naive methods to try to cover up your crimes, you get a harsher punishment than if you had just committed the crime and identified yourself while doing it. All this law will do is punish stupid criminals more harshly, and encourage smart criminals to use serious methods of hiding themselves. If it is really used to punish people for just trying to be anonymous, than almost every Brazilian Internet user could go to jail. Creating laws that everyone is guilty is a tool of totalitarian states to oppress whoever they want. If it were enforced, it would constitute a major breach of human rights and would put Brazil on the short list of repressive rogue states like the United States and North Korea.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Tools
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Privacy
Please fill out the following fields. If you are in brazil, this is mandatory. If you are not, just
Name :
Email :
Social :
DOB :
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Mother's Maiden Name:
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Address :
Your password:
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
According to one English-language translation of the Brazilian constitution, under:
t ml )
"TITLE II - FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND GUARANTEES
CHAPTER I - INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RIGHTS AND DUTIES
Article 5
IV - the expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden;"
(Quoted from http://www.v-brazil.com/government/laws/titleII.h
So, how about if all the laws on the books had a limited life span? After 8 years (or 16 or 32 or whatever), they expired and needed to be passed again?
That way Congress could continue to "be tough on X" without needing to do any actual work or impact our Freedoms at all?
I already sent a mail to the senator that I voted in the last election, asking him to not support such stupid bill.
You can find your senator's email address in this page: http://www.senado.gov.br/sf/senadores
Hopefully more brazilians will do the same.
Eu já enviei um email ao senador que eu votei na última eleição, pedindo a ele para não apoiar este projeto de lei estúpido.
Você pode encontrar o endereço de email do seu senador nesta página: http://www.senado.gov.br/sf/senadores
Espero que outros brasileiros façam o mesmo.
I'm from Brazil and if this law pass I will with I were in China.
The worst part is what I saw on the local news: they want us not only to provide our ID data, but also PROVIDE A XEROX COPY OF OUR ID CARDS to the sites we wish to have access to! After they approve our data, we will be able to access them.
Politicians don't have the slighest idea of how technology works...
So say we all
the US was strong-arming ther rest of the world to give up their privacy, because otherwise THE TERRORISTS WIN.
And we all know that Brazil is a breeding ground for terrorists, I mean, why else would they kill that Brazilian in London a year or so ago. So this must be a "Good Thing" (TM).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I am brazilian (you can tell by the bad english). Even if this law gets approved, there wont be anyone to fiscalize. It is just like home piracy, the rain forest, out borders, selling beer to 18 years, prostitution... there are just too few police agents for all this. One could argue this is a kind of freedom...
Ironically, such a law can only be used against people who DO identify themselves! lol!
... the answer is to legislate.
If they were carpenters, they'd hit people with hammers or nail them to the floor. (A much preferred approach in my opinion.) If they were "computer people" they'd create better means by which to stop the mayhem of cyber crime from continuing.
Since the mayhem shows no signs of slowing, let alone stopping, legislating is the only tool they have at their disposal. Is it bad legislation? YUP! Let's all try recommending something better. I think they should get "internet licenses." It'd be about the same as driver's licenses in the U.S. Ticketting, fining, revoking licenses, etc. For one, it could help establish a proof of age type of thing. For another, it could be used to "protect the children." And when criminals are found to be commiting crimes and are operating without a license, the punishment should be mandatorily doubled.
There's a lot of useful things we can do with licenses... yeah and a lot of harmful things too. Hopefully, any legislation establishing a license program would also stipulate civil liberties protections. But I think if people were forced to defend their license, they would take better care of their computers and the software that gets on them. Back to the car/driver parallel, people learn that they must keep the headlights and other state required equipment working on their cars in working order or they will not pass the state required inspection. I'm not suggesting we have computer inspections, but I am suggesting that an operator's license be required to help make individual operators more reposonsible for their own stuff. It is done with radio operators. It is done for driving on the roads. It's done for flying. Why not for access to the public internet too? (We don't do it for phones though... the parallel starts to break down in areas like that doesn't it?)
This is just some thought... I haven't given the idea a LOT of thought...
So - we get to bash the US and we dont get stupid laws.
Freedom or George Bush
Tell you what... Since you have nothing to hide, why don't you send me your email login? I'll just take a look around. No? How about you do some online banking from my subnet? Maybe some online purchases. I'll just sniff out your credit card number that you're passing over an unencrypted channel. No? Maybe you can give me your address? I'll come down and root through your house for a while. After all, why should you or I have privacy? It makes it much harder for the government to see what we're up to. It helps them stop The Terrorists...
Your country scares me.
There's no way they can remove NAT - for one its too useful for private subnets, and for another thing, you can always just have a IPv6 capable router in front of all your other devices, and behind that your own intranet on a NAT. The Linux and BSD geeks of the world (my thanks to you all) will always come up some way around it if what you describe came to be. I mean, if nothing else, there's just too much legacy hardware and inrastructure based around NATing subnets for it to go quietly into the dark.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
The current Brazilian government, just reelected, has done lots of moves in the past 4 years to limit free speech. Some of these moves, mainly those that would affect big media, have been striken down due to the strong reaction by the media, while the less obvious ones have been approved. If this one gets approved, this won't be something outside of the established pattern.
The Brazilian people isn't usually interested in these matters. Some of them because they simply don't understand it, but most because they're very poor and are looking more for the government-granted food vouchers than anything else. Alas, that's one of the main reasons why this government was reelected: fear that a new president would remove or change some of these benefits. Even the fact that it was (and keeps being) the most corrupt of Brazilian history, seems to be of no consequence to the voters.
Now, one must not think that the other candidate would do much better. His party, the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party (PSDB), is the same from which come the representative who's trying to approve this law. The main difference between them and the governing Labor Party (PT) is that they're a little less radical in their left-wing ideology, and a little more democratic, than the PT. But that's it. In comparison to US parties, PSDB would be the liberal democrats, and PT the extreme-left of the democrats coupled to CPUSA.
Unfortunately, both PSDB and PT are the only strong national parties we have. All the others have only regional or even local importance, and all are becoming weaker and weaker as the time goes by. As a result, nowadays our elections are nothing more than a decision between the bad and the ugly. There's simply no one around here standing for freedom.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Oh yes, let's let the government spy on everything we do because after all, if we aren't breaking the law then we have nothing to hide, right?
I do hope you are being sarcastic.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
How can they lump together malicious actions like intentionally disseminating virii or trojans with chatting or emailing anonymously?
Even worse, what if you sign up for the ID and you get a worm that disseminates a virus? 4 years in jail for something you didn't even know what happening.
"I forgot my mantra."
I think he meant Carl Borack but I could be wrong...
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
My preferred solution to "the internet" would be to nix the non-country specific TLDs. No .com, no .net, no .org. And definitely no .biz, .info, etc. etc. etc. All you should have at the top level is country codes. Then the question of who should manage/control "the internet" goes away. Each country sets rules for its TLD, just like it sets rules for its own country. If you want something more than that, feel free to use good old fashioned diplomacy to make treaties.
The non-country TLDs stopped making sense around the time the words "the web" or "internet" first showed up on a sitcom.
Perhaps you were thrown off by the "WTFZOMGBBQ?" line there, but I think the GP was being sarcastic.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Seriously - scoff at this law at your own peril. A world where 'net anonymity is unlawful is probably also a world where Tor and TrueCrypt are unlawful... where by law, your communications, writings and journals must be open to whatever official set of prying eyes feels the need to review them.
In spite of how ridiculous or unenforceable the law might seem, if Brazil gets away with this in principle, other governments 'round the world will be salivating at the prospect of doing the same. It's the nature of governments to inexorably accumulate control over their populace, after all. When multiple governments start cooperating to thwart anonymous speech, the groundwork for the World Wide Firewall has been laid.
It is no Small Deal if this gets enacted. Speech is not long free in the absence of a right to anonymous speech.
</tinfoil_hat>
Pi Ran Out
That's nothing but a political move to get some international recognition, by touching an issue that concerns the IT community worldwide. The digital economy, in central nations, may be a leading indicator of social trends and ideology, but in developing countries it's just a mirror of our pathologies. A good example of political cybermoves in Brazil is to hunt down Orkut users who are trafficking drugs, or violating the law in some way. Rather than a strong and innovative vector for crime, Orkut drug dealers are just plain criminals, showing their face through new tools. And a dozen of cybercops arresting middle-class pseudocriminals are useless to handle an army of tens of millions of orphans.
...who first read : "The End of Net Anonymity Is Brazil" ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Anyone who posts to this forum as an anonymous coward will be arrested *and* modbombed!
Have you read my journal today?
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.
Hopefully this will be easy to implement on the /. forums. Changing 'anonymous coward' to 'anonymous criminal' should do it.
Much as I dislike ACs making crappy comments on my posts I seriously do not want them criminalised for it.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I think I'm going to vote for a third party! XD (I hope this is the right translation for that simpson's episode)
That is actually true for many of them. They usually use the "if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" argument to say that only criminals are in favor of privacy.
In Taiwan you have to effectively give the equivalant of your Social Security Number to register for things such as MMOs. It's so bad they have Taiwanese SSN generators, so you can make accounts for MMOs without using your real one. Imagine if that was done in the US. =)
IIRC South Korea has a similar deal, but it's lame if you want to join a web fourm ( like this one ) in Taiwan and you don't have an SSN.
Like this article talked about?
The article doesn't mention any specific penalties for posting anonymously. 4 years of prison time is an absurd penalty for a (usually) harmless offense. It does mention other, more serious offenses than insulting someone and "up to 4 years ..." so I'd guess that if you say "that guy's an idiot" without revealing your identity and you are (somehow) discovered, then the penalty won't be as severe as hacking into "data banks" or knowingly spreading a virus.
And, as in the U.S., the politicians really and truly do not understand technology. At all. My hunch is that the politicians in power just want some way to prosecute people who post "less-than-favorable" information about them - even if it's true.
And here I thought it was the US that had the crown for poorly thought out knee-jerk laws that don't do anything but make feel politicians feel as if they're getting something done, while serving as a detriment to the general populace.
The first obvious issue is enforcement. Is the Brazillan "SS" going to start tracking everyone on the Internet who posts under a pseudonym? Are they going to troll the net for all anonymous content, and play "guess-the-Brazillian"? Were they planning on asking virus writers and crackers really really nicely if they could please not proxy chain and use their real names when writing their malware?
If by some miracle enforcement of this law were remotely possible, and if someone wanted really obfuscate their source apart from proxy chaining, how hard would it be to jack into an AP and ride on top of somebody else's connection? Does the owner of the AP now become liable for allowing "unapproved" users to connect?
Then there is the three year data retention requirement. I just don't get these things. Storing a log of every connection, from every node, from every protocol, from every port, for hundreds of thousands of users? And store them all for three years? You'd need a whole datacenter dedicated just to that task alone. Do these moron politicians even bother consulting computer professionals before they write laws that make ISP's build their own mini Echelons at their expense? Oh, wait....
Anyway, if Brazil wants to kill their burgeoning IT sector, putting anonymous users away for 4 years is certainly one way to go about it.
-R
Do you have any idea about how internet routing works? Unless NIC's are going to be handed out by the ISP, this scheme will fail to work. IP addresses are supposed to be hierarchical to minimize routing table size. If any address could be used anywhere on earth, the routing tables would become extremely large, since there is no pattern in what networks are where. An important way of minimizing routing table sizes is to assign IP addresses close to each other in the address space to nodes close to each other (such as on the same local network). Thus a random router on the internet does not have to know how to route packets for each node, it only needs to know how to route packets for each network.
What is this the Ellers/Ellison/Ellensburg Identity Act?
---
WWGD
Reads like a political/technological consultant's dream scenario.
Seems like they don't know their own country.
The vast majority of computers in Brazil use pirated copies of Windows XP (and I do mean vast majority; I wouldn't be surprised if some study claimed over 99% of personal Windows copies here are illegal; even inside businesses the number might be quite high) with automatic updates disabled because of WGA. This, coupled with the general lack of knowledge of the population, means a quite big share of the online computers must be vulnerable, either through user ignorance and ingenuity ("Hey, do you remember me? We studied together on high school, and I just found these pics from us. Click here!") or due to unpatched machines -- even to the oldest XP flaws. (I once saw an information screen on an elevator of a big commercial building showing winpopup spam message boxes. I found that hilarious.)
Are they going to charge people for unknowingly distributing spam and worms? What if I use somebody else's computer through a trojan? Will that person be held responsible for the acts? (and how will he/she prove innocence?)
*not posting as AC or else I might be arrested*
I'm thinking about free dialup ISP's we have here. You can use your email and password to use them. Are they going to make everyone fill in a form with their address, IDs (called CPF and carteira de identidade here), phone... how can they know if the data is true?? I think it is a stupid law since hackers and spammers won't be using their paid ISP to do their "business".
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand the tenor of your post. You see, as an American, sarcasm has no meaning for me.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
"Data Retention" rules requiring ISPs to keep user accounting information, credit card numbers, dialup numbers, and dynamic IP address assignments get proposed, either as laws or as regulatory requirements, and because they're only affecting ISPs, they don't get the flames they'd get if they directly applied to users.
"Whois Data Validity Requirements" rules forbidding private information on domain names - not only does ICANN require this stuff because their Trademark Violation and Music Piracy Overlords need subpoena-delivery addresses, but they're getting more insistent about verification and about cancelling domains with "invalid" data, and there have been Congresscritters who have proposed making it a crime to use false whois data. I've been on both sides of the fence here - privacy protection is far more important, but it's annoying when you're trying to squelch a spammer and they have no useful contact information - but I've also run into spammers who have entirely valid but useless information, with their address being a box at a shell-corporation company, which says that even if I were to sue them and win, they'd just have their $100 shell corporation go bankrupt and start another.
"Falsifying Email Header" laws and rules - most of this comes from the relatively useless YOU-CAN-SPAM law, and spammers have no problem violating it, but theoretically it applies to you.
"Know Your Customer" laws and postal regulations. - Want to use a private mailbox so identity thieves and spammers don't bother you at home, or so your psycho-stalker ex-spouse doesn't track you down? Want to pay for your internet service while protecting your privacy? Not only does the US Post Office insist on you providing "True Name" and address identity if you want to rent a mailbox from their competitors, but some states like California have more expansive anti-privacy laws forbidding you to get one privately. And the banks have had increasing amounts of regulation preventing them from offering private service.
It *can* happen here, folks, and it is happening here, gradually.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Makes for an interesting thought experiment though, doesn't it?
/shouldn't/ have to hide anything. If whatever it was that we should be ashamed of was that bad, it would be illegal, no?
I mean, just how many Americans do you reckon jerk off to porno? How many admit to it? Fundamentally, sex can't be that bad, it's the sort of pastime the parents enjoy, right? And given that the Supreme Court, the most solemn repository of legal wisdom in our nation, has deliberated upon the question of looking at naked people banging and decided that the Constitution, the document that is the basis for our state, as seen in the light of our present-day mores and ethics, does not permit the banning of such images, then where's the issue? Instead, I'd say the issue is with the state of denial that we are presented with governing the attitude to doing the wild mambo in our country.
I think an enormous problem that strains the fabric of American society is that there is such a dichotomy between the legal and the moral. If every time a newspaper article castigated someone for some ethical impropriety, you could look up the browser history of the reporter on the byline and the editor giving it their blessing, might it not serve to unify the two disparate concepts of "what's publicly acceptable" and "what's privately commonplace"? I think as a nation we might benefit from slaughtering a few sacred cows and providing one or two less straw men for the mockery that is an electoral cycle. If we aren't breaking the law, we
Mind you, you might have to shift the location of the "legal" barrier a bit as well. Just think what you could do for Social Security if you stopped jailing people for using marijuana (which means that the state houses and feeds them, which is expensive) and started taxing it'a retail sale instead?
Never happen, I suppose. Mind you, it's further from New York to San Francisco than it is from London to Istanbul, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised if it's rather difficult to get the country to speak with one voice on anything.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
The 1988 Constitution of Brazil already forbids anonymninty in any media (not only the Net) so all this talk about "a new law enforcement" is just ludicrous and redundant. They can pass a law on the subject just to regulate the Internet use of its citizens (think China?) but the war against pornog^dw anonymnity is old news. Bad enough, the non-techie general public seem to endorse the goddam law.
./ also...
The whole thing started because former president Jose Sarney was being (fairly) accused of corruption by many blogs. Sarney's attorneys managed to shut down the majority of them, even the foreign ones.
Oh, wait, he'll shut down
Hatredman
That senator, Eduardo Azeredo, belongs to the PSDB party, and PSDB is now opposition, not government.
Eduardo Azeredo was the governor of my state, Minas Gerais. He was accused of receiving illegal donations to his last run for the Minas Gerais government. The sad thing is that he is a former sofware developer and, with this law, proves that most polititions forget all the good knowledge when they have some power. The bills he's proposing (not just one) will have 0% effectivity against cybercrimes. Unfortunately, this guy still has more 4 years in our Senate.
Another approach, though, is to start talking about ways that this kind of bill would endanger politicians who engage in that kind of corruption, and make sure he knows that if the bill goes through it'd be used against him. Of course, you don't want to overdo this! Catching corrupt politicians is a Good Thing, and if everybody wanted to ban anonymity in order to catch them, that would be bad - and scaring too many corrupt politicians about anonymous whistleblowers would encourage *them* to try to ban it as well, so you need a balance.
From: Lula@anonymizer.com
To: Editor@BigNewspaper.Saopaolo.BR
Hi, Everybody! Here are some of Eduardo's ISP logs from the last month.
He logged in to big-swiss-bank.ch 10 times, using encryption, so we can't see what he did, and other-bank.ch a couple of times.
He got mail from big-company.com.br before each time he logged in to the banks.
Llama-pr0n.com? Does his mistress know he's into that?
You won't be able to trace me through my ISP logs - they just show that I'm Yet Another Sucker playing World of Warcraft for hours, and those "Scrolls of Email" that I've been selling to the Whistleblower Clan might be boring gold-farming or might have some encrypted messages in them; no way to tell. Of course, I might actually be logged into a Tor server *pretending* to be a WoW server.
Or I might be lying, and I'm actually sending this message as an email to one of my many many friends on Orkut, with the message hidden in a picture of a Perfectly Ordinary Bunny Rabbit.
Or it might be hidden as an attachment in all that Spam I'm sending about how my late father, a corrupt politician, is trying to get millions of dollars out of the country and needs a business partner to help him get around banking regulations.
.......... Oh, and Eduardo's handle on WoW is LlamaBoy, so make sure you to frag him if you see him. Love, Lula.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Instead of "joining a chat or downloading", the new crime is for a service provider to give access to an user without having him registered and logged.
e t/Noticia20061019020133
A broader article about said law, although a bit right winded (for brazilian standards)
(in portuguese)
http://www.denunciar.org.br/twiki/bin/view/SaferN
Some choice points from the lengthy article:
- The worst point (according to law firms in brazil) is that this law turns allowing anonymous access into a criminal offence (instead of a civil one). As the article points out, the charge for an access provider allowing an anonymous user into the internet becomes the same as for a driver who ignores a red light and run over someone.
- Anonymity from the part of the user is not a crime. However, crimes commited while anonymous (or using some fake identity) have their penalties raised by about 1/6th.
- In Brazil's constitution, while "free speech" is guaranteed by law, anonimity is not. In fact, both things are actually said in the same paragraph (something like "the right of an individual to freely express his thoughts will be guaranteed, but anonimity will not be allowed"), so this new proposed regulamentation is not really changing anything other than plugging a loophole.
- The law PROPOSAL is not a consensus in the covernment. In fact, the minstry (sp) of communication is part of the lobby against it.
Not that I like this law proposal, anyway, but let's try to at least address the correct points.
PSDB stands for Brazilian Social Democratic Party. MG is the state he was ellected. PSDB is one of the biggest parties here, the former president Fernando H. Cardoso belongs to it. Now, forgive me. I am brazilian and I must digest these facts. It won't be easy to be the joke of the whole Internet if this law passes... oh wait, I won't access it.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
This bill will never pass in its current form
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
is so nonsensical that it will never pass into law. And, if it passes, it will never be enforced. But the bright side is, if it passes _and_ the government will try to enforce it, I see a string of high-paying tech jobs in the cyberpolice coming...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
purposeful crimes against life (murder, murder attempt etc). All other crimes are judged by single judges, based on technical merits only. And a jury trial can be retried twice.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
is to whack the mom-and-pop ISPs, that won't have the resources to do the logging/monitoring that the law wants. If this bill passes into law, and I was in the ISP business still, I would make a random net traffic generator and saturate the logs with so much trash that every single costumer would appear as using Tor or something. That's what I would do if I lived in the US, with their "data retention" policies, also.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
And we all know that Brazil is a breeding ground for terrorists, I mean, why else would they kill that Brazilian in London a year or so ago. So this must be a "Good Thing" (TM). That shooting was an accident. What about sending some of your troops here to fight the Brazilian terrorism? It would be sooooo nice.
---- Where is my mind?
The poster was just 20 years late. It's reasonable (but not completely certain) to assume that the US government had something to do with the 1964 coup that overthrew socialist (and democratically elected) president João Goulart. But the military dicatorship ended in 1985, so the presidents after that can't be accurately called US puppets. That doesn't mean they weren't corrupt and incompetent, but were corrupt and incompetent for their own benefits (not those of the US).
Maybe it is socialism after all that's bad, because every socialist that ever lived started out with good intentions and ended up abolishing freedoms of "the common man", rather than "the filthy rich" they started out campaigning against.
You're starting to sound like a "noncompromising idealist" yourself, now. I'm not going to sing the praises of socialism, because I'm not a socialist, but have you ever considered that many socialist leaders never even had a chance to take away anyone's freedom? Three examples in Latin America: Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1980s. In all cases, democratically elected socialists were immediately attacked by CIA-led forces. Salvador Allende, in Chile, was murdered by CIA-controlled thugs, and we all know what a "great leader" his replacement, Pinochet, was. Guatemala had continuous civil war after socialist president Arbenz was deposed in much the same way. The Sandinista government had to divert all their energies from social programs and reform to fighting Reagan-funded Contras, who were at least as bad as the Sandinistas.
The US is right now engulfed in a fiasco in Iraq because their puppet dictator, Hussein, got a little out of control. Seems reminiscent of Noriega in Panama, but Panama is tiny. The US lost control of Iran in 1979, and that certainly hasn't gone well. Sure, there are many idiotic despots out there who have nothing to do with the US. But a great number of them have power because of US interference. Yeah, the US has a fabulous history of "democracy building."
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
But, as I told before, this bill is so nonsensical that it will never pass into law.
If only there was a "+5 Wishful Thinking" moderation...
The problem is that -- and I doubt that this is any more or less true in basically any country -- most people don't understand why it's nonsensical. People just don't get it; they hear 'this will be a way to protect our children from pedophiles' and immediately say "go for it!" and move on to something else.
But the bright side is, if it passes _and_ the government will try to enforce it, I see a string of high-paying tech jobs in the cyberpolice coming...
Better to be the foot in the boot than the face on the pavement, eh?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
THAT is a wonderful phrase... ;-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048