Following on from the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA spying, Brazil have announced measures that will protect the online privacy of their citizens and government. Read the full story at SFGate, or these snippets:
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.
Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube.
While Brazil isn’t proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians’ Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.
Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.
Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.
The most likely result is that governments around the world will decide to do their own spying, now that it has been pseudo-legitimized by the USA. However, if Brazil starts to fracture the global network, that will open the way for a “dark web” to operate, as well as a “safe web”.
Ultimately there are only two ways to go. You either have everything inter-connected with little chance of true privacy, or you have partitions that cannot communicate with each other.
It is great that Brazil might get their own email service, but any emails sent to the USA will still be spied upon.
