I'm glad I hit refresh and saw that the sensationalist title was edited, but even without that I think this article is a bit over the top. What they're doing is simple-
* Building more direct connections between themselves and other countries, to reduce the amount of traffic going through the US.
* Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens.
* Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying.
It's not surprising, and it's certainly not going to balkanize the internet. What it could do is cost US companies a ton of money in lost revenue as services move out of the country.
How exactly is fracturing the Internet and stopping the free flow of information will make it "stronger"? any sort of amplified indignation about the NSA is a red herring, Brazil had that plan for a long time and now and they are using the NSA as an excuse to accelerate it, and ironically their main reason is to enable more extensive local surveillance: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...
Adding links between nodes is not fracturing a network, on the contrary.
The strongest network is the full graph, where each node is connected to each other node, and it's also the network where it's hardest to spy communications, because they always occur directly between peers.
On the contrary, the weakest network is the star network, which is basically a tree, with a central point (or a few central points) where all communications must pass thru, and where it is easy to collect all of them.
With the Internet as it is built (by commercial ISP and country-wide communication monopolies), it is star shaped, and when you send a packet from Marseille to Barcelona, it goes in the best case, thru Paris and Madrid (where French and Spanish spies can copy it), and often it may even go thru Amsterdam and London (where the British, and therefore the NSA can copy it too). This is not good.
And privacy apart, it makes for a brittle network, since breaking a couple of main trunks (eg. a link between Paris and London and a link between Paris and Madrid), would prevent anybody from Marseille to communicate with Barcelona.
At all levels, increasing the meshing of the Internet is a good thing: add direct links with your neighbors, have your city establish direct links with neighboring cities, and of course, have your country establish direct links with neighboring countries, instead of going thru a central point in a potentially or manifestly hostile country (even if their private companies pledged to do no evil, they're still under the jug of the evil country).
There are MRS-MIL and LYS-ZRH fiber paths to protect the Iberian peninsula. A PAR-MAD cut does not bring down ONO or any of the other Iberian providers. Additionally, PAR-LON has more than one path, any backbone provider worth their weight will use both. Also, PAR-FRA-AMS-LON or PAR-AMS-LON are viable alternative paths should all LON-PAR paths be cut.
"Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil"
I hope they change how hosting and domain registration work in Brazil. I gave up registering .br domains because the way it works in Brazil is very obtuse. There's a centralized register (registro.br), their web site is stuck in 1995 (you can't change data easily, etc), and you can't register a domain for more than a year at a time (you have to renew every year).
This is totally wrong. Registro.br is very very easy to use, all you need is a brazilian personal or company id number, and you can pay up to 10 years on a domain, which costs less than 15 US dollars/year.
It's good to know it's changing. But it's still a centralized system and awfully bureaucratic. You need to register as an "Entity", where they give you a difficult to remember ID (unlike my easy to remember username at name.com, for instance) that is tied to your CPF (Tax Registration Number).
I've not touched them for some time having moved all the domains I used to have through them elsewhere (mainly due to opinions I have of them as a company than any technical issues as a registrar) so things may have changed.
Back when I did have domains registered through them I found the interface to be very busy and cluttered, full of opportunities to be upsold to, and there was not way of just registering a domain without actively saying no to a small pile of upselling related questions. I remember setting up private name servers being relatively hasslesome too (possible, but the options not obviously easy to find).
I think I pay a few cents (maybe even tens of cents, oh! the humanity!) per domain per year extra elsewhere (or did at the time of the move IIRC, I've not compared prices recently) but that isn't exactly going to break the bank for those I still bother to not let expire.
> they are a top domain registrar
They are certainly a popular registrar with a large customer base. Opinions on them being a top registrar vary widely especially as "top" could mean many things! But as I've not used them for a while I can't judge on technical matter or their current UI, I'll have to defer to you judgement on that. Other things would stop me ever moving back though.
Assuming Brazil's government thinks like any other, "so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens" probably means "so we can enforce our laws allowing us to spy on you (by knowing your private keys or such), but other countries can't (unless an appropriately rich entity pays the right people for access to said keys".
For proper privacy we need to implement it ourselves, unfortunately there are laws being written to ban that sort of thing for national security reasons.
Brazil is the world leader in saying that it's going to do something awesome and completely forgetting about doing something in order to make that happen.
Nothing is going to happen.
Example:
In order to have a seat in one of the trips to the international space station, Brazil should develop and build some of the windows of it.
We didn't and not because we don't know how, it was because of politics.
In order to make it appear that we didn't fail to the population, the president bought a X million dollars flight ticket to a random guy that today earns money by giving speeches about how dreams come true with hard work and that you can become an astronaut just like him.
The biggest part of the population thinks we earned it by doing something useful for the mission.
I can go on and on about this events if you need more.
I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. They'll spend a ton of money buying (because we can't build -or even design - it ourselves) before we withdraw and declare success.
> and not because we don't know how, it was because of politics.
Politics contaminate our universities and research centers so deeply that it masks any selection for actual competence. I seriously doubt we could develop a window. Putting someone on the tourist track was the only way a Brazilian could fly. The tab was about US$ 20 million.
For all that it's possible to know, the AEB repeatedly attempted the incredibly stupid idea of launching satellites into LEO using solid-rocket fuel engines. Naturally, all attempts failed, but that didn't stop them from trying until they got 21 people killed on a launch pad explosion. Some conspiracy theorists say it was sabotage, but I don't think such a design warrants the effort - physics alone can take care of it.
As someone that is friend of people of Serpro.and know some of Air Force research I feel offended.
Brazil do have researchers and brains and money, and politics get in the way.... We have even particle accelerators of our own design! Also, the rocket project was not scrapped, it is only waiting for new engineers to be trained, since.the last accident killed all of them.
Did you knew, that the card to pay a phone is a Brazilian invention? Or the language Lua that drives games like World of Warcraft, Baldur Gate, Far Cry 2... Or that no country matched Petrobras drilling techniques yet, or that our army use locally invented radars, anti-air equipment and so on. Or that the air force has. a locally invented portable air traffic controller station ( for those curious: it runs Debian ), or that CNPQ is investing heavily in research about how to cure heart problems with stem cells, or that the state universities in Sao Paulo are so good with image recognition that French universities send their students here to learn.
Brazil has one of the best academia in the planet, heritage of the emperor Pedro II that had the vision and.created the current system, and created stuff like the agronomical research institute.
Also we have lots of brilliant people, here ( Carlos lattes for example, that died some time ago ) or elsewhere (I forgot the name of the guy that researches uniting brain with machines, now he works for Duke.University), also we obviously have money
Don't insult researchers, we clearly have political problems that end killing cool stuff like the OSORIO battle tank, but don't claim our academia is incompetent, if it was, other countries would not hire people trained.ed here.
Yeah, I agree that Brazil has a ton of brilliant minds and a very inventive people. But unfortunately, here in Brazil, ignorance is a bliss and a very profitable business.
Also, Brazil is the only country that treat treats his researchers like a fast food workers. Poor salaries (when gov. pay something) which obligates them in working on two or three part-time jobs, no gratitude (the phone card, the BINA system, which government didn't helped the inventor on recognizing the patent) and so on. That's why a researcher/cientist stays no more than 2 or 3 years in Brazil after graduation or research publishing.
My father met the telecom guys (phone card and BINA), and the government not only did not helped, but did things that made their situation worse, in the end no inventor got any money for his invention.
It is just that the guy saying that the other poster was wrong, and that we don't know how to do stuff, is not only wrong, but insults people that (maybe in a stupid manner) insists in doing stuff here.
There is a reason why one of the biggest Free Software conferences is here in Brazil, and why Maddog (from Linux Foundation) comes here so much (I personally bumped into him in conferences I got invited as speaker about 6 or 7 times, even one totally failed conference where I had like 20 people watching, Maddog was there!), the government invests heavily into IT research. (there is Serpro, Cobra, military, and several other cool stuff! The military in particular has several very insteresting non-weapon projects, the brazillian military seemly loves to make stuff that is good for civilian use)
Oh, c'mon. The Lua language is the only relevant software contribution from Brazil that I'm aware of.
The guys behind Lua had to invent a language because the country was commercially closed at the time. The program forbidding technology imports was called "reserva de mercado" (market reservation) and was supposed to incentive local manufacture of semiconductors.
It was a colossal failure and today Brazil is not only irrelevant in electronics but has possibly the most expensive appliances in the world. Anything here costs 3 to 4 times the USA retail price.
Unfortunately we have a long tradition in such idiotic regulations.
ITA (a university that belongs to Air Force) famously let students to opt out of military, and many went around doing cool stuff.
I once saw a presentation of their students once, there are even people that went on to make games and stuff like that.
Also the military here likes to help Linux in general, even submitting patches, the air force in particular loves Debian and Ubuntu (last I checked, they moved 100% of their servers to Debian and 100% of workstations to Ubuntu)
Then we have some air traffic control software being developed, firewalls, anti-virus, whatnot... This is what I learned on tech conferences (thus obviously it is related to tech)
Also I've heard of the military helping people make vehicle engines.
And then we have Taurus (a weapon manufacturer) that had some business with my family, and seemly the military asked them to do some civilian stuff too (like use their armour technology to make clothes for perilous jobs, for example Motorcycle helmets, also they use their gun steel technology for other things, like construction, building factory machines, car parts...)
I think this has to do with that fact that the military here has some... funding issues. And thus need to cooperate a lot with civilian sector to get anything done.
Oh, and famously, the army built some stuff for the federal government that ended being on schedule, and used less money than budgeted (that they returned), although this was supposed to be normal, it was so exceptional that people think it is totally amazing and awesome (here federal government projects IF they don't fail outright, tend to blow both the budget and deadlines, and have shitty quality, result of hiring contractors and not checking ever if they are doing a good job or not, plus corruption).
> As someone that is friend of people of Serpro.and know some of Air Force research I feel offended.
Don't be. There are pockets of excellence surrounded by fluff. The fact remains that we, as a country, do not produce a lot. We can be proud of a little thing here, a little something else there, but not much more. And it's very sad.
We also have a cronic underdog syndrome perpetuated by countless broad opinions such as this. That only helps to undermine any kind of effort to change the culture of low self-esteem into a culture of excellence.
Feel free to demand more, but please do not undervalue every thing.
> We also have a cronic underdog syndrome perpetuated by countless broad opinions such as this.
You not noticing my acknowledgement of the pockets of excellence further demonstrates this point. I am not perpetuating this underdog syndrome, but I am pointing out several failures brought by a systemic attitude of politeness over correctness. Academic research thrives on correctness alone.
>Politics contaminate our universities and research centers so deeply that it masks any selection for actual competence.
This is a serious claim backed by no evidence whatsoever. It's an idea that permeates brazilian academia, it's understandable to some extent, but fails to accomplish anything other than undermining ongoing researches.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!
(...)
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same criticism could be applied to several institutions throughout the world. When I think about how U.S. is one of the countries where creationism thrives the most, it's clear to me that the problem Feynman is talking about affects everyone and every science.
Also, this is not proof of politics masking actual competence.
C'mon, the Latin America's biggest and most populous nation remains a long way behind the OECD average and in most cases lags behind most of its Latin American neighbors.
Research in Brazil is a joke, as anything else related to education. Privately funded research is almost non-existent and public universities have typically a 2:1 relation between staff and students - all of them are pretty inefficient. Private universities are expensive scams.
With all its deficiencies, USP is a top university and produces valuable researches. That's no joke at all. Just look at the Lattes curriculum of both its faculty and graduates. MIT, Harvard, Princeton —those are awesome universities but they are expensive too, not a thing most people can afford. Studying at USP costs nothing. That's quite an achievement.
I don't mean to be overlook the problems. I'm just pointing out an important difference.
Given how heavy taxation is, how many chairs it offers (10k) for the whole country, and how unequal is the access to those chairs for the average citizen, I don't find it as remarkable.
Wait, careful with the strawman there. Yes, USP is funded by taxpayers but the students themselves don't have to pay anything. The reasoning behind this choice is that the cost of a student in that University can be shared by everyone because the value of the knowledge produced there is also shared by everyone. People who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford college-level education are given the chance to study.
It's a decision that is aligned to the principles of social democracy. You could argue against it, take a more neoliberal stance, but that's not the point. My point is that USP is trying to do something different.
I wish I knew more about how private universities in US are funded. I have a feeling that aside from the tuition students pay they still receive some sort of aid from the government.
True, everything has it price. But it's also true that free market is not really free.
Second high speed rail link from London to various parts of Northern England. Instigated by previous (Labour) government, who later admitted that they had basically pulled the thing from their bum as a Keynsian reflationary boondoggle with zero economic justification for the investment.
Inexplicably, the current government, rather than using the fiasco as an excuse to jump up and down and laugh at Labour's contemptible attitude towards the public purse, have decided to treat the whole affair as if it were a deadly serious well-thought-through major public works investment, and are defending it with rottweiler-like tenacity as if it were their very own dearly beloved pet project.
Baffling.
Anyway, I guess it will get built successfully in the end, as these things tend to ... although it's main use will probably be to hasten the journey of refugees from the economic wastelands of the North to the only place in the UK with actual jobs on offer. I.e. London. (Where they will all sleep at night is beyond me, however -- as the usual NIMBYs are doing a great job of preventing the development of what we actually need -- large volumes of high density housing for London-based workers).
A fine summary although I'd argue that what the Government needs to do is encourage growth outside of London (it's really not that bad up here and I was born and raised in London). This is a small country we should be able to distribute ourselves a little better.
It's not that I'm against H2 because I don't think we need good infrastructure links between the North and South, it's just that I don't see that reducing an already 2 hour Manchester to London commute by 30 minutes is worth the money (already estimated at around £20 billion). I'd like to see a counter proposal describing what you could with that kind of money invested in the current network. My concern is that if H2 goes ahead, we will see each Government that comes to power pointing to it as the solution to all rail problems and taking little interest in the rest of the network.
You are embarassed? as a Brazillian citizen im proud!
Brazil was the only country until now that took the correct mesures and stood against this
the time to be embarassed now its for them, not for us.. they do it wrong, we are doing right! whats wrong about what we are doing now?
what are you saying about the astronaut, etc,etc.. has nothing to do to what is happening and the news right now..
and whatever its wrong with my country has to do with pessimistic and living in the past joes like you..
dont like something? try to make it better.. the time to expect for the other to do it for you its over.. we are grown ups now! grow up with it!
When new a startup (eg, Instagram) comes along now it isn't allowed to serve the Brazilian market? I suspect that Brazil will suffer more than it gains.
I'm not sure about that. Let's assume that the startup offers a service the Brazilian populace are keen for.
In that case it may be worth it for the startup to invest in Brazilian data centers.
If they can't afford it, or simply don't see an opportunity in that market, then it may instead be an opportunity for a local company to do something similar employing locals to get it done. This happens all the time, but usually because of internationalization woes instead of the location of data hosting.
You could even argue that there's hidden value here in helping to maintain cultural diversity by not using U.S. services for everything you do online and increasing the demand for local educated talent.
> Let's assume that the startup offers a service the Brazilian populace are keen for. In that case it may be worth it for the startup to invest in Brazilian data centers.
"Brazil's wiretapping mania is a holdover from the country's 20-year dictatorship[...] The president of the Supreme Court, who believes he also was spied on, called police methods totalitarian. In September, Brazil's president suspended the head of the spy agency over allegations that it eavesdropped on officials."
"Eavesdropping incidents are not new. A decade ago a presidential conversation was caught when the office of the national development bank was bugged while the Telebrás phone company was being privatised, presumably so that a bidder could gain an advantage over rivals. Other incidents have occurred since, suggesting that Abin agents and phone-company employees can all too easily be bribed."
While it's great that countries around the world are belatedly waking up to the fact that the US wields a disproportionate amount of influence on the Internet, which it also uses to shore up its strategic military or commercial objectives, as users we ought to distrust any other country just as much as the US.
IMHO Catch-all Internet surveillance is a drug that no country's intelligence or law-enforcement apparatus can stay away from.
I'm based in India and am under no illusion that my government - given the chance or the technical capability - will attempt to secretly monitor its own citizens in a manner far worse than possibly the US.
So while I distrust the US, I also distrust India when it comes to any kind of "control" over the Internet. And so I hope, will Brazilians.
As users we ought to take our own independent and personal choices on how best to safeguard our online lives.
The difference is the USA acts across the planet, insisting its laws apply to all the world, applying its mockery of a justice system to the majority who never voted for it.
What goes on in India is for Indians. As a Brit I have no fear of Indian justice. US "justice" and attitudes scare the crap out of me.
Of course it is nowhere near the reach of the US, so yes, your overall point is still valid.
But I fear we're conflating two different issues here - Internet surveillance and illegal rendering. Just because some countries may not be doing the latter doesn't mean we as users should be blase about the former.
Yes, let's look to the British to tell us how a country should keep to its borders, handle international relations, balance domestic surveillance/privacy concerns, run fair and impartial international trials, and teach us about India.
If you are from US, then you might as well because present UK at least seems less imperialistic. However, this could be simply because it wields less power than it did in past centuries.
Although, as far as the UK is concerned, I have noticed that once Brits leave the island, the preponderance of their liberalism and tolerance seems to evaporate, leaving only an unpleasant core of xenophobia and bigotry. Or perhaps that is just some sort of self-selection / sampling bias, driven by the sort of people who tend to head off into the wide open yonder?
While it is true that all countries will salivate at the opportunity to setup a surveillance apparatus that is made efficient by technology, our only hope is to safeguard our online lives by demanding policy change. Any technical safeguards that we may enact are easily subverted by government agencies showing up at our door step and shipping us to limbo.
>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better."
I find it rather annoying that everything that the current Brazilian government does gets labeled as "socialist" or "soviet" or something along those lines. Isn't having the NSA spying on everyone what you would expect of the KGB? So why can't Brazil take measures to protect its interests?
There is no privacy in Brazil, you have to put your fingerprints in a database for having an ID card or driver license issued. Biometric access is being enforced for voting and a lot of other trivial citizenship exercises.
There is no doubt that the PT party ("workers party" in Portuguese) has a leftist doctrine that is a mix of "Chavismo" and ancient "soviet" crap that is out of fashion even in Russia. The only reason Brazil is not as trashed as Venezuela is that Brazilian press and other civilian institutions are a little stronger.
Lula (the former president) and Dilma (his puppet and actual president) endorse some of the worst dictatorships governments in the world. Lula even endorsed nut jobs like Ahmadinejad from Iran.
The EUA gives these clowns as a "friendly government" label for lack of a better term. Brazil is not a democracy, it is a dumbocracy.
GP may read as a political rant, but I'm focusing in the first sentence; Brazil restricts a lot of privacy and, for my dismay, people seems to accept it. For example, I have to give up my name and ID number every time I board an interstate bus (yes, buses, not planes), law enforcement officers can stop you anytime and ask for your papers without justification (there is no "probable cause" here), and, beginning the next year, all cars will have to carry a RFID tag for tracking (gov justifies this as a way to "improve the traffic", but it will not happen -- also, a lot of countries with civilized roads never used them, so why we'll need?).
The worst part is that people grown used to it and do not notice how outrageous our privacy issues are.
It didn't read like a rant to me, what did you read from scardine's comment that made you feel it could be perceived as a rant? Perhaps it was some venting, but that's all.
I know I should not respond to ad hominem, but here we go.
When I was young I used to blame "the right" for every real or imaginary problem in the world. I dreamed of revolution. When you are 20, if you are not socialist you don't have a heart, but if you are still socialist at 30 you don't have a brain.
I have a book for you (seriously): "Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot". This book cured me from "Open Veins of Latin America" and all the leftist crap around here.
Rabid? Sure I'm pissed off with myself for being so naive (even voted for Lula in his first term, just to see the most corrupt government since the end of the military dictatorship) - but not nearly as rabid as the left wing criminal organizations like the MST:
(watch from 0:22s) when they destroyed 7,000 orange trees and got along with it. They damaged heavy machinery, burned down computers, looted employees houses and stole fuel. And got along with it.
These terrorists are funded using my tax payer money by my own schizophrenic government. Everybody that dares to scream "the king is nude" is labeled as a rabid right wing zealot.
This is in part what the delegates tried to accomplish during the "infamous" ITU summit last year. But Google et al launched a major FUD campaign to Save the Internet, when in reality it was to save American interests and keep control over the net.
Well, the proposal was no better that what the americans are doing. I am not from the US but if I have the choice between being the internet being run by the US or china/russia plus a bunch of other dictatorships I will go with the US (but I still abhor the NSA surveillance).
Of cause, I would prefer a better option where there was a system that was not dominated by any countries but I dont see the ITU proposal as being good for the internet.
This poses a very interesting psychological problem.
Assuming the NSA is the bully of the situation, I wonder if the fact that the rest of the world will (hopefully) claim more and more independece, will lead NSA to back up and have a more reasonable position, or will cause it (and the government that backs it) to have a more and more bullier attitude position.
After what happened, it's clear that the guys running it have a god-like image of theirselves, and I doubt that within this perspective, one would cast at least some doubt over his actions.
a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments
One could argue that it would be a 'dangerous' second step.
I have been thinking about this for a good few years now and I think the idea has some value however it comes at a cost.
What makes internet so good is its population. It is the population of the entire world without borders and immigration control. You can talk to anyone and approach anyone or at least you have the ability to.
Knowledge rules and it is directly propotional to the number of people available on the internet. Once nations start going down the track of setting up virtual borders (believe this is what this would lead to), all flow of information will be condemned as it is in the real world. A national network would be used in making solid cases for embargos and sanctions against people and their knowledge, which they were at full liberty to share and disclose as they saw fit. Surely this is not currently at the scale of Great Firewall of China, however, it can easily become that. Consider this move as the first brick.
Surely internet surveilance exists and anybody who thought it wasn't ever since its creation was either stupid or indifferent to the idea. The difference between then and now is that we have proof of this. A nation isolating itself into a pocket of its own internal communication network will not solve this problem. I personally think that it is a step back not a step forward. I believe TOR had the right idea but it is no silver bullet. People of Brazil might think that this is a good thing but rest assured all that would change is they'd be transitioning from global internet surveillance to local internet surveillance.
This is what US overreach in spying has led to, and probably more will follow Brazil in doing this soon, and I can't blame them. Hopefully the US government will realize that greed and lust for power aren't always good things, and can sometimes lead to very bad things, and the opposite of what they were expecting to get (breaking the camel's back and all that).
"Brazilians are among the most voracious consumers of social media, ranking No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube."
While I'm afraid of president's real will, I can't stop thinking about, if we are 3 on FB, 2 on Twitter and Youtube then why not host some of the data here? We got a huge ping delay to those company servers anyway.
>"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better."
This is interesting. If Internet did really follow a free-for-all model, NSA would've never happened. In the same way free market benefits U.S. but takes its toll on Rwanda, the "free-for-all" internet of today benefits the Silicon Valley at the expense of the privacy of non-american people. If the United States had already taken measures to inhibit NSA's surveillance instead of justifying its actions and chasing Snowden, Brazil wouldn't have to move in that direction.
It's basically U.S. unwillingness to build a truly free Internet that pushes other countries towards "independence". We should also be aware that the source of the news is a San Francisco-based newspaper, which adds yet another layer of enconomic interests to the story.
The root cause of all this is the leaked document about a possible backdoor installed within Petrobras IT infrastructure. Since this company has a lot of employees at high/strategic positions nominated directly by the government, we assume that there is a continued information exchange between them and the government, and that this information is so sensitive it could expose high scale politicians to the media in an uncontrolled way (a situation which the current political party in power tries to avoid at all cost). In short, the government knows there is a lot of dirt under the Petrobras rug, and all those actions we read in the article refers to putting heavy furniture on top of it.
I'd make a comment about how I was trying to keep my data in my own country, but I'm not, Australia is happily going along with PRISM. It's not even reported in the news here.
So what's to stop the NDA / GCHQ hiring moles to put trojans inside these networks / organisations and getting the info anyway? I thought this was already happening.
The balkanization of the internet is inevitable, now that we have two push forces towards that, a strong desire to stay away from other countries intelligence agencies and copyright.
This is my concern as well. It's somewhat inevitable that the Internet will end up politically divided.
The boundary-less state the fledgling has had was, in American historical corollary, the great western expansion. Eventually though structure, regulation and political boundaries are inserted by institutions designed to do those things.
Brasil building more connections to the rest of the world is a good thing for global infrastructure. Diversity and multiplicity is awesome.
It'll be disappointing once they start tuning their national boundary firewalls and routers to avoid or block services and end up cutting N America out of S America (presuming Chile, Argentina etc. will start moving toward a Brasil-supplied internet).
The history with an open and free for all internet that we have enjoyed does inspire me, it is somewhat amazing in retrospect that it was so, despite not having an international organization to defend these principles.
The fact that it happened, perhaps due to those ideas of freedom to share knowledge and connect with each other over wast distances and boundaries, makes me believe it will happen again, in another form.
We will find each other, just like we did on bbs, irc and in various in-game chats and forums, perhaps next time in a field of ciphers, stenography and darknets, small lights of communities will spring up.
* Building more direct connections between themselves and other countries, to reduce the amount of traffic going through the US.
* Encouraging companies to host data directly in Brazil, so their privacy laws can be enforced for their citizens.
* Developing an encrypted email service to reduce US spying.
It's not surprising, and it's certainly not going to balkanize the internet. What it could do is cost US companies a ton of money in lost revenue as services move out of the country.