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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.'"
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.