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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.'"
If this sticks, it will be awesome, not for the security but for the statement it makes. Way to go, Brazil!
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
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.
And they're going to do all that with Cisco routers, right? LOL
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
At any point in that chain, the US can still snoop or put US-friendly people/technology in place.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
fuck up pings for brazillians playing mmorpgs on u.s. servers.
signed.
the american gamer.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'll build my own internet! With blackjack! And hookers!
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
> "Leave It To Beaver"
The didn't call them Brazilians for nothing.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Because if current rates of adoption are any indication, an ipv6 internet won't be US-centric for years to come.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Our government deserves to get slapped in the face at every turn by every other country over the heavy handed and far overreaching actions of the NSA. I hope the condemnations with actions keep rolling in.
Thanks again Snowden. You woke up the world and it's changing for the better because of you.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The only thing this is meant to accomplish is allowing the current administration to pose as being interested in protect some sort of "national sovereignty" and transferring some cash to government contractors - the standing Party needs cash to finance it's next run for the presidency. The half dead state owned phone company, Telebras, still exists despite having no customers. The government would finance the new cables, Telebras employees would get their kickbacks and funnel money into shady government contracts. Politics as usual with a little antiamericanism sauce.
A common factor in almost all Brazilian corruption scandals is that somehow the media gets access to "secret" telephone conversations: the country is already bugged (legally sometimes) by the Federal Police and (always illegally) by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency. It's not uncommon for the administration to leak data from legal and illegal bugs to pursue adversaries. It's scarily common and rarely protested by the general populace.
It disgusts me.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
BRAZIL: Dear Facebook, please store your data about our citizens on a server that is located in our Country.
Facebook: No.
BRAZIL: Well, then we will just prevent all our citizens from accessing your website...
Facebook: Darn.
Not every state is obsessed with spying on its citizens. Most, but not all.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 information for people it is only natural that the same would be true for governments. People forget that governments spy on other governments because - that is their job.
Now you can either get piss and moan about it, or you can do something security in general. Let me explain things to you with your door locking example, it's a bit like putting up a sign banning Bob the burglar while forgetting that you live in a bad neighborhood with thousands of other burglars.
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.
And how that is worse than being spied, controlled, and manipulated by a foreing country, one that had no problem supporting the overthrow of a democratically elected president in Brazil in 1963, and that don't have clear hands on the recent revolutions in the middle east. Remember, they are reacting to what US is doing, place the fault where really is.
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.
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 american parent company to get them some data on a brazillian what happens? Given a choice between breaking brazillian law and being punished for ignoring an american national security letter what do you expect an american company to do?
3: What happens when an amercian user and a brazillian user want/need to work together. For example suppose a brazillian user makes his calender accessible to his american friend. Should that calender be hosted in brazil? the USA? both? How will features like finding a slot where everything is free work if each country's citizens data has to remain within the country.
They are also taking about reducing reliance on the USA for connectivity to the rest of the world which just seems like good sense (afaict they already have one direct connection to europe but I doubt that is really enough) though it may well increase costs in the short term (US internet transit is CHEAP).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Maybe Mr. Schmidt should encourage the US government to stop forcing people into fiefdoms just to have some security.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
Except that, because of the NSA's clusterfuck idiocy, now we have each country building it's own internet, which may or may not actually be part of a larger global network. Expect more of this in the future. It is the state's version of a 'walled garden' platform.
Thanks for shitting in the pool, NSA.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Wow, you're 1/3 native amerindian, 1/3 european, and 1/3 smurf? That's quite a mix.
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?
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 word again.
I really wish we took more of a belt and suspenders approach and encouraged encryption at multiple levels. That will never happen if we continue this business of casually equating insufficiency with irrelevance. Wouldn't it be nice if clear text didn't flood onto public wires at the first transient misconfiguration of the The One Armoured Pipe To Rule Them All?
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 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".
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.
I don't mind that we control the whole thing, I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world and then are supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
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.
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 check.
The reason for this is that unlike the US, Brazil has limited backbone connects to the rest of the world. This is part of what they're trying to fix.
Here's a picture that explains it fairly well:
http://www.gigaomnimedia.com/images/cable-capacity.jpg
As you can see, other than one small line via Argentina to Spain, all of Brazil's international traffic goes through the New York or California trunks.
They're still better off than Australia though, on all things Internet-related.
I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world ....
We didn't -- read up on Internet History. 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 getting your news/info?
1) First-world guilt would be feeling bad because we have something that most people in a less-developed nation lack, so that doesn't fit at all.
2) RTFS/RTFA! The problem isn't that we exercised control, it's that our fucked-up NSA intercepted an ally president's communications despite their country having no record of hosting terrorists or having a lot of fundamentalist Muslims, hacked into a major government-owned company's network, and spied on innocent citizens of theirs that trusted US companies to respect their privacy.
3) Nobody is saying we should feel guilt, regardless. People outside the US that don't realize how little control we have are blaming American voters for the atrocious behavior of our corrupt government -- they're saying we should feel angry about our government's behavior and do what's necessary to get it back under control, basically just like a lot of us are saying.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
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 if you feel safe, you know, could be tigers outside.
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 between country sized networks, so you are not cut off every time an intercontinental cable is damaged.
And to my mind at least, it makes perfect sense not to send all you traffic through a nation that can so easiliy be perceived as increasingly manipulative and untrustworthy in its intentions. When you look around in the world, this is what you find:
- America used to represent the ultimate freedom in many people's eyes; but it has been become much less so over the last 20 years. So, what people see is that IT IS GOING THE WRONG WAY. Where is America likely to be in another 10 years?
- Europe is, as Douglas Adams would have put it, mostly harmless. Not because they are marvellous and honest, but because they are so magnificently messy; will it have changed in 10 or 20 years' time? Nah.
- China used to be seen as extremely restrictive and backwards, but have improved massively and consistently over the last few decades. Where does it feel likely they will be in 10 or 20 years?
I mean, out of these three options, which one would YOU choose? Even Americans don't trust America any more.
There's no need to even count the data. If you're actually putting the servers on in the USA instead of Brazil the speed of light will rat you out. Put the servers too far away and the increase in latency becomes noticeable.
:).
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.