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The Internet Your Rights Online

Brazil Approves Internet Bill of Rights 132

First time accepted submitter Dr.Potato (247646) writes "After more than three years being discussed, Brazil's Internet Bill of Rights was approved on April 22nd (and in Portuguese). It was rushed through the senate in order that president Dilma Roussef could sign it during the meeting on internet governance that occurs in São Paulo this week. In the bill of rights, among other things, net neutrality was maintained, providers will not be legally responsible for content published by users (but are forced to take it down when legally requested) and internet providers are obliged to keep records of users' access for six months and can't pass this responsibility to other companies." Brazilian internet users may continue to have the right to be surveilled on social media, too.
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Brazil Approves Internet Bill of Rights

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  • by PapayaSF ( 721268 ) on Thursday April 24, 2014 @12:11PM (#46834043) Journal

    internet providers are obliged to keep records of users' access for six months

    Exactly whose "rights" are they talking about?

    • From the original in Portuguese:

      "O sigilo das comunicações dos usuários da internet não pode ser violado. Provedores de acesso à internet serão obrigados a guardar os registros das horas de acesso e do fim da conexão dos usuários pelo prazo de seis meses, mas isso deve ser feito em ambiente controlado."

      which translates roughly as:

      "The user's communication privacy cannot be violated. ISPs will be obliged to keep track of access and connection hours for six months, but

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Sounds fair.

        I don't think so. There should no forced retention of such data.

        • by ZeRu ( 1486391 )
          So, what when someone uses an Internet to reveal their plans of a terrorist attack? How would the police get them if their IP cannot be traced?
          This seems like a well-written law for a change, and Brazilian government wasn't very Internet-friendly in the past as they used to block YouTube and ban video games (even rather innocuous ones like CounterStrike).
          • by Anonymous Coward

            Well, it has always worked like this here in Brazil: you either log access, so that you can transfer blame, or you get the blame. It REALLY is that simple. So, before the Marco Civil, we had to log it *and* retain it for a loooooong while, and jump through hoops to answer the police (not the court!). Now we only have to do it for 6 months, and the law cannot request anything past that date, and all requests must be made by a court. They can, however, request that *specific* records be kept for longer i

      • True, that's not too bad, but an obligation to keep any records at all is still not really about "rights."

        • Knowing what they are legally obliged to do is very important to the ISPs. Knowing what the requirement is, frees them from collecting even more info because of ambiguity. It sounds a lot better than whats going on in the rest of the world at least.

      • "keep track of access and connection hours"

        No URLs, no content, just connection times.

        What does "access" mean if not the URL or addresses of the sites you access during the time you are connected? If they had meant just "connection hours", they wouldn't have needed to say "access" because connection includes access to the ISP.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The new law states clearly that the records consist solely of the ip and time of connection, being illegal to make any analysis or record of the contents or protocols used in such connection.
      The lack of this information kind of matters.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Rights given by men, can be taken by men; they are therefore not rights.

    If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

    Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

    No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as

    • No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

      So, jails and prisons are out, then?

    • You are basically wrong about rights. There is no objectively correct formulation for what a right is. The idea of rights precedes philosophical discussions about them. There are rights discussed in some of the most ancient writings we know of.

      You can be given the right to enslave by a government. You might say 'in philosophy x you have no right to enslave' and you can also so 'philosophy x is the best way of thinking about this because' but you cannot say 'It is a rule of nature that you cannot enslave

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      You are confusing natural rights and civil rights.

      If a society offers no rights beyond natural rights to it's citizens, it may not ethically expect any obedience to it's laws nor payment of taxes.

      As for your other claims, nobody said people aren't being paid.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Rights are a term used in rhetoric, originally invented to convince theistic believers that their god made them inherent.

      You don't even have the right to breathe. You, instead, have the need to breathe. However, as has been proven throughout history, this need can be overridden by someone with more power. And then you die.

      This same thing is true of all other "rights". The term was invented to arouse emotional support, and it works for that purpose. It has no other meaning or function in nature. It doe

    • You assume that is impossible for a set of rights to exist which can ever be in opposition to one another.

      But, that's clearly false. For instance, you have a right to freedom of speech. But I also have a right not to enter into a contract under false circumstances.

    • Actually now we do have that right (to force the internet back on).
      1. You are choosing one definition of right based on your personal preference and chosen literature, and you are stating that anything different is not and cannot be right (pun intended). Another definition is that a right is something a certain society agrees upon. Under your definition there can be no such thing as "the right to enslave". But in reality this right was used by many people over time. Even life is a society given right, thi
  • by fredprado ( 2569351 ) on Thursday April 24, 2014 @12:13PM (#46834065)
    has just given itself the right to apply censure in whatever it pleases, by using this law as a Trojan Horse and inserting in it a vague statement regarding what is unacceptable and not protected by freedom of speech.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Hmm, no. That already existed. There is very little freedom of speech protection in Brazil (mostly because it is ridiculously easy to claim "slander" here), and that hasn't changed at all.

    • The FCC just substituted its oversight of subjective free speech protection for true net neutrality. What's funny about this is that while Comcast is chucking an evil chortle thinks they just actually crowned the mega church business incorporations as the new netflix. Mega churches are slowly taking over businesses due to their tax privledges, immunity from antitrust, large capitalization that let them operate a loss to kill competition and apple-scale brand loyalty. The mega churches just got another

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Same deal in the U.S. but we didn't get network neutrality in the bargain.

  • by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Thursday April 24, 2014 @12:21PM (#46834117) Journal

    "hat goes some length towards protecting net neutrality"

    Where exactly is this stated in the actual document [netmundial.br]?

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      It is pretty clear in "Freedom of expression: everyone has the right to hold and express opinions, and to seek, receive, and impart information on the Internet without arbitrary interference." as in 'without arbitrary interference'. Also there is "avoiding arbitrary or unlawful collection of personal data and surveillance" as in you can not analyse people's data packets in order to treat 'arbitrarily interfere' with different kinds of data being transmitted. Not to forget " Everyone should have the right t

  • by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Thursday April 24, 2014 @12:27PM (#46834181) Journal

    internet providers are obliged to keep records of users' access for six months
    Nothing like making it easy to build the list of links for an ISP by putting all the data in one place. Bet it's online accessible, too.

  • by CmdrEdem ( 2229572 ) on Thursday April 24, 2014 @12:56PM (#46834411) Homepage

    Keeping net neutrality is a huge win. Other articles in the bill are very positive too.

    The shitty part is the record keeping. As far as my legalspeak goes, and that is almost nothing, what I understood is that if I have a website I have to maintain a 6 month record of all my visitors. I'm guessing that they refer to general access logs, just like Apache access log files or some equivalent. What I did understand is that ISPs cannot keep those records. But I might be very wrong. Either interpretation is bad anyway, so it does not matter much how bad it is.

    What bothers me more is that our equivalent to the FCC (Anatel) is building a database and backdoor access to all ISPs client data. If what I heard is right (two sources working in a third party developer for a local ISP) they will have access to every byte sent through every Internet connection in the country. The buffer size I do not know. THAT bothers me a lot.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    would never allow that to happen in 'Merica. They fear and hate the Internet because it is against their religion. Also they do is plot against access. Even here in Seattle the conservatives have successfully destroyed Internet access. The fastest connection I can get is dial-up with copper.net. They provide great dial-up, but after over a decade with them, I fucking want faster access, but the city will not allow CenturyLink or Comcast to upgrade their equipment. I had DSL, but it was just too unreli

  • In the meantime, Harper is trying to pass laws [stopthesecrecy.net] against Canadians.

    Message to Harper: you're supposed to be an elected official to represent the people, not a corporate puppet out to sell out our rights and natural resources to the highest bidder. Canada isn't your private land and property, it's the country you're supposed to be governing.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Will Canada become a worker's paradise once all resources and production are in state hands?

  • Dear everyone here,

    Brazil is not the U.S. It has a different culture. Your cultural norms cannot be blindly fit onto Brazil. Please stop trying.

    P.S. The rest of the world would like to express the same thing. They started a queue.

"I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'" -- Robert G. Ingersoll

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