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Brazil Announces Plans To Move Away From US-Centric Internet
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.'"
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)
morcego
+1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.