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The End of Net Anonymity In Brazil
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Nov 06, 2006 12:40 PM
from the good-while-it-lasted dept.
from the good-while-it-lasted dept.
DieNadel writes, "The Brazilian senate is considering a bill that will make it a crime to join a chat, blog, or download from the Internet without fully identifying oneself first. Privacy groups and Internet providers are very concerned, and are trying to lobby against the bill, but it seems they won't have much success." From the article: "If approved, it will be a crime, punishable with up to 4 years of jail time, to disseminate virus or trojans, unauthorizedly access data banks or networks and send e-mail, join chat, write a blog or download content anonymously."
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The End of Net Anonymity In Brazil
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So remember boys and girls... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:So remember boys and girls... (Score:4, Funny)
You will get to practice unzip, touch, finger, grep, strip, mount. And last but not least, fsck, dump and sleep
Holy Smokes (Score:2)
So many, many ways around this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Secondly, there are so many ways around this when you are a criminal. Crack someone else's machine and you can do whatever you want as if you were legally that person. Who stupid is that?
If you're really good, you'd crack 2 machines outside Brazil and use them to bounce traffic around before it got to you. Your machine and record would be 100% clean.
Finally, let's talk wireless. Unless the government wants to crack down on unsecured wireless connections, they're going to lose this one.
This is nothing more than an attempt to scare the good citizens into self-censoring their legal activities. And that is disgusting.
Re:So many, many ways around this. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/control_group)
If we paid attention to that logic, we'd have 50% fewer laws than we do.
Not that you're wrong, of course, just that passing laws is how the government proves it's Doing Something, irrespective of wheter the law does anything other than screw the innocent.
And I don't think this varies appreciably from government to government.
As always... (Score:1, Flamebait)
(Last Journal: Thursday November 08, @06:00PM)
Re:As always... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, right, despite thinking you're being sarcastic. Because collecting huge amounts of information about legitimate travellers does nothing to stop terrorists. Just look at the No Fly List, that catches every terrorist who books a ticket under his own name (i.e., none) while inconveniencing thousands with similar names. Idiotic security theatre. And how many times must it be pointed out that the 9/11 terrorists mostly had legit IDs and clean records; they would have walked though today's security just as easily, after surrendering their shampoo bottles. Money tracing? Similar profiling goes on here, inconveniencing every poor schmuck trying to send money home to his family, if his name happens to be Mohammed, while the actual terrorists duck the whole system.
All the information needed to predict, and prevent, 911, was already in the US government's hands before the event. They need better, smarter analysis, more people on the ground, not more noise. But that's what bureaucrats know how to do, and that's their solution to every problem.
First, (Score:1)
Just maybe... (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
What about kids? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.pisosen.com/content/Madrid.html)
I am very serious (Score:1)
Re:I am very serious (Score:4, Informative)
If you mean "assuming the requirement is not abused", that would not be a serious question. Every coercive power over others is always abused, to the greatest degree that interested parties can get away with. The whole problem of freedom is minimizing the opportunities for such abuse.
Of course no one objects to a prohibition of spreading malware. Here are a few of the more obvious problems with the removal-of-anonymity part.
Unauthorizedly? (Score:1)
"I call murder on that!" -- Smelly Hippy, Futurama
Usenet? (Score:2)
When all Usenet posts are legit I'll believe it.
In other words, the only people this will affect are those who do take precautions to adequately hide themselves, those ignorant of the law, and those where the government just wants to tack on 4 more years!
How long until anomyity is a crime world wide? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 29, @04:31PM)
unenforceable... (Score:1)
Terry Gilliam Was Right? (Score:2)
Don't Brazil Bash (Score:2)
What is PSDB-MG, anyway? Piece of Shit Damn British MG?
Re:Don't Brazil Bash (Score:4, Informative)
(http://simplesmente.com/)
This is slashdot, and you didn't think a question like that would go unanswered, did you ?
PSDB is Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (http://www.psdb.org.br/ [psdb.org.br]) translates to the Brazilian Socio-Democracy Party. MG stands for Minas Gerais, the state Senator Azeredo represents.
As a Brazilian I should add:
* PSDB is the leading opposition party in Brazil. Its candidate just lost the presidential race (39% to 61%).
* Normally I wouldn't think this sort of thing to come out of PSDB (usually more liberal than the government). But heck...
* Mr Azeredo has been involved in an unrelated corruption scandal after proposing the law ("valerioduto").
* I also do not agree with such a law, as many brazilians don't (babelfish this, for instance: A Liberdade da Rede corre Perigo [ig.com.br])
* This law may not pass (be approved) -- I hope it won't.
* Even if it does, it may not be enforceable, as someone here already pointed out -- Freenet comes to mind.
First Bag is Free (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
Like a drug pusher who tells you "the first bag is free".
Or an ISP, telco or bank which unilaterally changes Terms of Service or privacy "agreements".
Related story (Score:1)
What about proxying outside the country? (Score:2)
wtf (Score:1)
Wait a second... (Score:1)
Sounds like... (Score:1)
(http://www.czaries.net/)
sometimes i wish (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Saturday April 21 2007, @06:17PM)
You could have a background music with your post... Brazil, Brazil....
How is this enforceable? Any site that is access over a secure connection cannot be monitored. Unless they have guilty-until-proven innocent system of justice, of course.
Fine some one they can not find? (Score:2)
(http://www.darkspores.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 01 2007, @10:44AM)
With Onion Routing Networks [eff.org], Mixmaster Type II Anonymous Email [sourceforge.net], GPG/PGP Type I Anonymous remailers [feraga.com], and bidirectional encrypted anonymous e-mail addresses [iusmentis.com] that can deliver to a news group [google.com]
Add to this the use of unsecured 802.11 networks and there is just no way to stop a person that truly wants to be anonymous on the internet.
Unfortunately most do not know how to use them, so most of the internet is only sudo-anonymous.
How can this be effective? (Score:2)
(http://unixclan.no-ip.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday December 27 2006, @12:59PM)
If someone is truly anonymous, the government won't be able to find them. To stop anonymity, you must ban every service provider and user that enables others to be anonymous. Does this law ban any technology that could lead to anonymity? If so, doesn't that basically ban every protocol used on the Internet (you can tunnel, proxy, and relay over http, ssh, any p2p system, etc)? It seams like this law is practically useless, but may be provided as an additional punishment for criminals. So if you break the law online, and use naive methods to try to cover up your crimes, you get a harsher punishment than if you had just committed the crime and identified yourself while doing it. All this law will do is punish stupid criminals more harshly, and encourage smart criminals to use serious methods of hiding themselves. If it is really used to punish people for just trying to be anonymous, than almost every Brazilian Internet user could go to jail. Creating laws that everyone is guilty is a tool of totalitarian states to oppress whoever they want. If it were enforced, it would constitute a major breach of human rights and would put Brazil on the short list of repressive rogue states like the United States and North Korea.
Legal in Brazil Howto (Score:2)
(http://www.outpimp.com/?x=481655731 | Last Journal: Thursday December 08 2005, @12:13PM)
Options
Privacy
Please fill out the following fields. If you are in brazil, this is mandatory. If you are not, just
Name :
Email :
Social :
DOB :
DL:
Mother's Maiden Name:
Email:
Address :
Your password:
Brazil's constitution seems to forbid anonymity (Score:1)
"TITLE II - FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND GUARANTEES
CHAPTER I - INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RIGHTS AND DUTIES
Article 5
IV - the expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden;"
(Quoted from http://www.v-brazil.com/government/laws/titleII.h
write to your senator! (Score:2)
You can find your senator's email address in this page: http://www.senado.gov.br/sf/senadores [senado.gov.br]
Hopefully more brazilians will do the same.
Eu já enviei um email ao senador que eu votei na última eleição, pedindo a ele para não apoiar este projeto de lei estúpido.
Você pode encontrar o endereço de email do seu senador nesta página: http://www.senado.gov.br/sf/senadores [senado.gov.br]
Espero que outros brasileiros façam o mesmo.
I wish I were in China instead! (Score:3, Informative)
The worst part is what I saw on the local news: they want us not only to provide our ID data, but also PROVIDE A XEROX COPY OF OUR ID CARDS to the sites we wish to have access to! After they approve our data, we will be able to access them.
Politicians don't have the slighest idea of how technology works...
That won't work (Score:1)
Useless (Score:2)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
As a legislator... (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
If they were carpenters, they'd hit people with hammers or nail them to the floor. (A much preferred approach in my opinion.) If they were "computer people" they'd create better means by which to stop the mayhem of cyber crime from continuing.
Since the mayhem shows no signs of slowing, let alone stopping, legislating is the only tool they have at their disposal. Is it bad legislation? YUP! Let's all try recommending something better. I think they should get "internet licenses." It'd be about the same as driver's licenses in the U.S. Ticketting, fining, revoking licenses, etc. For one, it could help establish a proof of age type of thing. For another, it could be used to "protect the children." And when criminals are found to be commiting crimes and are operating without a license, the punishment should be mandatorily doubled.
There's a lot of useful things we can do with licenses... yeah and a lot of harmful things too. Hopefully, any legislation establishing a license program would also stipulate civil liberties protections. But I think if people were forced to defend their license, they would take better care of their computers and the software that gets on them. Back to the car/driver parallel, people learn that they must keep the headlights and other state required equipment working on their cars in working order or they will not pass the state required inspection. I'm not suggesting we have computer inspections, but I am suggesting that an operator's license be required to help make individual operators more reposonsible for their own stuff. It is done with radio operators. It is done for driving on the roads. It's done for flying. Why not for access to the public internet too? (We don't do it for phones though... the parallel starts to break down in areas like that doesn't it?)
This is just some thought... I haven't given the idea a LOT of thought...
Typical (Score:1)
(http://www.alexandergieg.org/)
The Brazilian people isn't usually interested in these matters. Some of them because they simply don't understand it, but most because they're very poor and are looking more for the government-granted food vouchers than anything else. Alas, that's one of the main reasons why this government was reelected: fear that a new president would remove or change some of these benefits. Even the fact that it was (and keeps being) the most corrupt of Brazilian history, seems to be of no consequence to the voters.
Now, one must not think that the other candidate would do much better. His party, the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party (PSDB), is the same from which come the representative who's trying to approve this law. The main difference between them and the governing Labor Party (PT) is that they're a little less radical in their left-wing ideology, and a little more democratic, than the PT. But that's it. In comparison to US parties, PSDB would be the liberal democrats, and PT the extreme-left of the democrats coupled to CPUSA.
Unfortunately, both PSDB and PT are the only strong national parties we have. All the others have only regional or even local importance, and all are becoming weaker and weaker as the time goes by. As a result, nowadays our elections are nothing more than a decision between the bad and the ugly. There's simply no one around here standing for freedom.
Incongruous (Score:2)
(http://d3.blogsite.org/)
Even worse, what if you sign up for the ID and you get a worm that disseminates a virus? 4 years in jail for something you didn't even know what happening.
This mustn't stand (Score:2)
(http://tooi.org/ | Last Journal: Monday July 24 2006, @08:50AM)
Seriously - scoff at this law at your own peril. A world where 'net anonymity is unlawful is probably also a world where Tor and TrueCrypt are unlawful... where by law, your communications, writings and journals must be open to whatever official set of prying eyes feels the need to review them.
In spite of how ridiculous or unenforceable the law might seem, if Brazil gets away with this in principle, other governments 'round the world will be salivating at the prospect of doing the same. It's the nature of governments to inexorably accumulate control over their populace, after all. When multiple governments start cooperating to thwart anonymous speech, the groundwork for the World Wide Firewall has been laid.
It is no Small Deal if this gets enacted. Speech is not long free in the absence of a right to anonymous speech.
</tinfoil_hat>
The anonimity bill from a political standpoint. (Score:1)
That's nothing but a political move to get some international recognition, by touching an issue that concerns the IT community worldwide. The digital economy, in central nations, may be a leading indicator of social trends and ideology, but in developing countries it's just a mirror of our pathologies. A good example of political cybermoves in Brazil is to hunt down Orkut users who are trafficking drugs, or violating the law in some way. Rather than a strong and innovative vector for crime, Orkut drug dealers are just plain criminals, showing their face through new tools. And a dozen of cybercops arresting middle-class pseudocriminals are useless to handle an army of tens of millions of orphans.
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday February 12 2007, @04:47PM)
Moo (Score:1)
(http://tkatch.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:09PM)
ACs (Score:2)
Much as I dislike ACs making crappy comments on my posts I seriously do not want them criminalised for it.
Sounds sort of like Taiwan (Score:2)
(http://icculus.org/~mongoose/)
IIRC South Korea has a similar deal, but it's lame if you want to join a web fourm ( like this one ) in Taiwan and you don't have an SSN.
Like South Korea? (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.cvalleyvelo.com/)
Like this article [slashdot.org] talked about?
The article doesn't mention any specific penalties for posting anonymously. 4 years of prison time is an absurd penalty for a (usually) harmless offense. It does mention other, more serious offenses than insulting someone and "up to 4 years ..." so I'd guess that if you say "that guy's an idiot" without revealing your identity and you are (somehow) discovered, then the penalty won't be as severe as hacking into "data banks" or knowingly spreading a virus.
And, as in the U.S., the politicians really and truly do not understand technology. At all. My hunch is that the politicians in power just want some way to prosecute people who post "less-than-favorable" information about them - even if it's true.
A feel good law (Score:2)
The first obvious issue is enforcement. Is the Brazillan "SS" going to start tracking everyone on the Internet who posts under a pseudonym? Are they going to troll the net for all anonymous content, and play "guess-the-Brazillian"? Were they planning on asking virus writers and crackers really really nicely if they could please not proxy chain and use their real names when writing their malware?
If by some miracle enforcement of this law were remotely possible, and if someone wanted really obfuscate their source apart from proxy chaining, how hard would it be to jack into an AP and ride on top of somebody else's connection? Does the owner of the AP now become liable for allowing "unapproved" users to connect?
Then there is the three year data retention requirement. I just don't get these things. Storing a log of every connection, from every node, from every protocol, from every port, for hundreds of thousands of users? And store them all for three years? You'd need a whole datacenter dedicated just to that task alone. Do these moron politicians even bother consulting computer professionals before they write laws that make ISP's build their own mini Echelons at their expense? Oh, wait....
Anyway, if Brazil wants to kill their burgeoning IT sector, putting anonymous users away for 4 years is certainly one way to go about it.
I can't believe I am the first to mention this (Score:1)
---
WWGD
Seems like they don't know their own contry (Score:1)
Seems like they don't know their own country.
The vast majority of computers in Brazil use pirated copies of Windows XP (and I do mean vast majority; I wouldn't be surprised if some study claimed over 99% of personal Windows copies here are illegal; even inside businesses the number might be quite high) with automatic updates disabled because of WGA. This, coupled with the general lack of knowledge of the population, means a quite big share of the online computers must be vulnerable, either through user ignorance and ingenuity ("Hey, do you remember me? We studied together on high school, and I just found these pics from us. Click here!") or due to unpatched machines -- even to the oldest XP flaws. (I once saw an information screen on an elevator of a big commercial building showing winpopup spam [wikipedia.org] message boxes. I found that hilarious.)
Are they going to charge people for unknowingly distributing spam and worms? What if I use somebody else's computer through a trojan? Will that person be held responsible for the acts? (and how will he/she prove innocence?)
*not posting as AC or else I might be arrested*
What about free dialups? (Score:1)
The 1988 Constitution of Brazil already forbids it (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 07 2005, @08:21AM)
The whole thing started because former president Jose Sarney was being (fairly) accused of corruption by many blogs. Sarney's attorneys managed to shut down the majority of them, even the foreign ones.
Oh, wait, he'll shut down
Summary is misleading (Score:1)
(http://claus.castelodelego.org/)
A broader article about said law, although a bit right winded (for brazilian standards)
(in portuguese)
http://www.denunciar.org.br/twiki/bin/view/SaferN
Some choice points from the lengthy article:
- The worst point (according to law firms in brazil) is that this law turns allowing anonymous access into a criminal offence (instead of a civil one). As the article points out, the charge for an access provider allowing an anonymous user into the internet becomes the same as for a driver who ignores a red light and run over someone.
- Anonymity from the part of the user is not a crime. However, crimes commited while anonymous (or using some fake identity) have their penalties raised by about 1/6th.
- In Brazil's constitution, while "free speech" is guaranteed by law, anonimity is not. In fact, both things are actually said in the same paragraph (something like "the right of an individual to freely express his thoughts will be guaranteed, but anonimity will not be allowed"), so this new proposed regulamentation is not really changing anything other than plugging a loophole.
- The law PROPOSAL is not a consensus in the covernment. In fact, the minstry (sp) of communication is part of the lobby against it.
Not that I like this law proposal, anyway, but let's try to at least address the correct points.
Re:Anonymity is illusion (Score:2)
(http://www.monkeyengines.co.uk/)
Essentially yes. Onion routing rather effectively masks the connection between the origin of a connection and its end source. As far as I know, this sort of scheme is only inherently vulnerable to two attacks. First is if the majority of onion routers are compromised, which is rather obvious and somewhat unlikely flaw. The second is in timing attacks, which essentially look for correlation between the times users request pages, and the times servers receive requests. However, the latter attack is difficult to pull off unless you're monitoring a particular server for access by a particular person, and thus unsuitable for widespread monitoring.
Onion routing is a connection hiding technology, and does little to protect data. It does prevent your ISP from seeing your data (as its encrypted before it passes into the routing network), which may count for something, but it doesn't protect responses from the end server from being intercepted. However, data security is a relatively well understood field, and is a generally simpler problem to solve than effective anonymity over a packet switching network.
True. But as with security, the majority of the populous is always going to be under-protected. However, projects such as Torpark [torrify.com] are making it easier to achieve effective anonymity with relatively little technological experience, so perhaps the number of people using effective tools to mask their identity will increase over the next few years.
Re:Picking Nits (Score:2)
Face it, our beloved language encourages neologisms.
Re:Of Course (Score:2)
Re:the internet is getting bloated. (Score:2)
The bill states that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net, with full name, current address, phone number and the equivalent of the Social Security Number. To access the Net without providing this information, or to give false information, will also be a crime.
Senator Eduardo Azeredo wants to legally recommend every Internet user to buy the government approved certificate, and use it on every connection to the Net.
Ironic - politicians make it an issue to protect children from the Internet, now they are demanding that anyone (including children) using the Internet must give out their personal information including their address and phone number, which is exactly what every parent been told to teach their kids not to do.
How exactly, is this going to work with a family computer - is every person going to have to log out and log back in again, each time someone sits down at the keyboard?
Given that some mobile phones can actually download webpages, you are going to need to store that certificate on your phone. So what if that mobile phone gets stolen?
I know something that you don't know. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Of Course (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Monday November 14 2005, @01:47PM)
Re:Of Course (Score:1)
Re:It's all a matter of time.... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday December 04 2006, @04:08PM)
Re:It's all a matter of time.... (Score:2)
Do you have any idea about how internet routing works? Unless NIC's are going to be handed out by the ISP, this scheme will fail to work. IP addresses are supposed to be hierarchical to minimize routing table size. If any address could be used anywhere on earth, the routing tables would become extremely large, since there is no pattern in what networks are where. An important way of minimizing routing table sizes is to assign IP addresses close to each other in the address space to nodes close to each other (such as on the same local network). Thus a random router on the internet does not have to know how to route packets for each node, it only needs to know how to route packets for each network.
Thankfully (Score:1)
(http://slashdot.org/~hummassa | Last Journal: Wednesday August 22, @05:11AM)
Re:Of Course (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~hummassa | Last Journal: Wednesday August 22, @05:11AM)
Re:Of Course (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 15 2003, @11:00PM)
The poster was just 20 years late. It's reasonable (but not completely certain) to assume that the US government had something to do with the 1964 coup that overthrew socialist (and democratically elected) president João Goulart. But the military dicatorship ended in 1985, so the presidents after that can't be accurately called US puppets. That doesn't mean they weren't corrupt and incompetent, but were corrupt and incompetent for their own benefits (not those of the US).
Maybe it is socialism after all that's bad, because every socialist that ever lived started out with good intentions and ended up abolishing freedoms of "the common man", rather than "the filthy rich" they started out campaigning against.
You're starting to sound like a "noncompromising idealist" yourself, now. I'm not going to sing the praises of socialism, because I'm not a socialist, but have you ever considered that many socialist leaders never even had a chance to take away anyone's freedom? Three examples in Latin America: Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1980s. In all cases, democratically elected socialists were immediately attacked by CIA-led forces. Salvador Allende, in Chile, was murdered by CIA-controlled thugs, and we all know what a "great leader" his replacement, Pinochet, was. Guatemala had continuous civil war after socialist president Arbenz was deposed in much the same way. The Sandinista government had to divert all their energies from social programs and reform to fighting Reagan-funded Contras, who were at least as bad as the Sandinistas.
The US is right now engulfed in a fiasco in Iraq because their puppet dictator, Hussein, got a little out of control. Seems reminiscent of Noriega in Panama, but Panama is tiny. The US lost control of Iran in 1979, and that certainly hasn't gone well. Sure, there are many idiotic despots out there who have nothing to do with the US. But a great number of them have power because of US interference. Yeah, the US has a fabulous history of "democracy building."