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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.'"
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.
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
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!
Lots more international fibre might be a good thing rather that treating the US as a passive hub.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
> "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.
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'
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.
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 might be only hot air on part of Brazil, but you can be sure that most governments of Europe and Scandinavia has similar feelings about it even if they aren't vocalizing it quite the same way.
Every major government right now is doing some serious inspections of where is their data flowing through, where is it stored and how trusty are the interests of those who control them... And you can bet they are not liking the answers they are getting.
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.
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.
Right. Just like how every time Google has been threatened with having local regulations applied to them in France or Germany or what have you, the for-profit corporation writes off the countries involved and pulls up shop.
Unless they, you know, cave. Which is pretty much every time.
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!
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.
It wouldn't hurt for Brazil to have more physical connections with other Latin American countries as well as other countries relatively near, such as perhaps a direct link to South Africa and Spain/Portugal (aka something across the Atlantic). Unfortunately west Africa isn't exactly an economic hot spot in the world and would be the easiest to reach.
What I don't understand is why you or anybody else is worried about "fragmentation" on this issue? Fragmentation of IP addresses? I thought IPv6 pretty much solved that problem anyway (with enough address space so every person can have thousands of IP addresses and still have room left over for governments and corporations). Routers can do a pretty good job of finding network addresses in even a very fragmented world infrastructure as that is sort of why they were invented in the first place. Network traffic certainly doesn't need to go into America first.
The "bad old days of dial up access" was mostly an issue of finding an ISP in your neighborhood.... which was eventually solved with pools of dial up access and then widespread DSL coverage. If you are complaining about bandwidth, I hardly think that is going to be a problem with additional links and physical connections between people in more distant parts of the world from the primary corridors of telecommunications. If anything, bandwidth will improve if peripheral edges of networks are connected as well as improving reliability. Fragmentation actually improves things as opposed to making it worse.
Perhaps you are complaining about fragmentation of services like more kinds of websites that are "portals". Would it be a bad thing if those services are broken up and people use things other than Google's gmail?
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!
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.
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.
Exactly. A similar thing happened in Finland a few years ago. The previously state-run mobile phone and internet provider was sold to a Swedish company and as a result, the hub for all the data flowing into and out of this provider moved to Sweden. The problem was, the Finnish government used this provider, and suddenly all government data was "overseas". This was/is illegal. So, they had to quickly build new datacenters in Finland to host all the government data. I would also speculate that Sweden's close ties with the US had some impact to the urgency as well.
Note, this was well before the whole Assange affair which also seems to smell of US interference/cooperation with the Swedish government in order to get him on Swedish soil so he can be extradited to the US for prosecution.
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.