[bestbits] Re: [governance] FW: [IP] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too

Fri Mar 21 16:22:43 EDT 2014

...And in the name of "Freedom of expression" for... business, as ever.

Amusingly, giving up the idea of local storage turns out to be more challenging to the Google, FB and others, as Brazil president wants foreign to companies to " be subject to Brazilian rules in case of legal disputes involving data, regardless of whether it is stored elsewhere."

It seems like the Marco Civil da Internet is now going that easy, and Rousseff wants to regulate net neutrality by presidential decree. For once, a governmental player, head of state seems to be fighting for its people.

JC

Brazil gives up on local data storage, demands net neutrality

Summary: Government backs down on demands of local datacenters in a bid to get support from the opposition but net neutrality remains a sticking point

By Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech |	March 19, 2014 -- 20:07 GMT (13:07 PDT)

Topics: Mobility, Government, IT Priorities, IT Policies, IT Security in the Snowden Era

In the latest chapter of Brazil's Marco Civil da Internet, Dilma Rousseff's government has backed down from its intentions to demand that companies store data locally in order to get opposition support to pass the country's first set of internet governance rules.

Despite being unhappy about the numerous delays around the voting of the Bill, the president agreed to postpone it once again to remove the requirement for local datacenters.

Even though Rousseff and key ministers had voiced their preference to enforce local storage followingthe NSA espionage scandal, the requirements were strongly criticized by businesses and the opposition - their point being that this could mean cost increases to users since companies would have to build local facilities.

The government may have given up on local storage demands, but will require that companies will be subject to Brazilian rules in case of legal disputes involving data, regardless of whether it is stored elsewhere.

"The question that is not negotiable is that the Brazilian law should be applicable to any data that has originated or circulates here in Brazil. Of course, having the data stored locally would make [the enforcement of the local regulations] easier," congressional relations minister Ideli Salvatti told Radio Estadão.

However, ditching local storage is not enough as net neutrality remains the most controversial point of the Marco Civil. Supported by the opposition, the telco industry wants to continue to base its business on data discrimination - this means setting higher or lower speeds according to individual internet usage patterns, load certain websites faster and also offer free access to certain content while charging for others.

While the government does not want to negotiate net neutrality, Dilma also wants to be able to regulate it by presidential decree after the Marco Civil is approved - but part of the government's supporter base and the opposition do not agree on that particular move.

Opposition leader Eduardo Cunha has said openly that a decree to regulate how telcos operate is a major annoyance, adding that this would get on the way of "freedom." However, the freedom cited by Cunha is more to do with business models rather than internet user rights.

The disagreements and the escalating tension between the opposition and the president's main ministers - particularly minister Salvatti, who was one of the main supporters of the requirement for local datacenters and was pushing for the voting of the Marco to take place yesterday - prompted the voting of the Bill to be postponed once again until next Tuesday (25).

The Marco Civil is now right at the center of a political battle involving interests that dig deeper than just guaranteeing civil rights in the use of the Internet - but Dilma wants to sanction it before April, when Brazil will be hosting a global internet governance event. However, time is short and the list of challenges appears to be getting longer.

Le 21 mars 2014 à 18:55, michael gurstein a écrit :

> Some information on another Internet Freedom supporter and significant IG
> "stakeholder"...
> 
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26677607
> 
> M 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Farber [mailto:farber at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 4:34 AM
> To: ip
> Subject: [IP] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your
> Email Too
> Date: March 21, 2014 at 7:22:35 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com
> 
> Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too By ROBERT
> MCMILLAN Mar 21 2014
> <http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/transparency_reports/>
> 
> Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's widespread efforts to eavesdrop
> on the web's most popular services - including Google and Microsoft and
> Facebook - the leaders of these companies have called on the government to
> be more transparent about the data it's lifting wholesale from their private
> operations.
> 
> But lost in this debate over privacy and national security is another
> question: How often are these internet companies snooping on their customers
> themselves? You can now read polished and detailed "transparency reports"
> that explain how often Google, Facebook, and Microsoft respond to government
> requests for user data, but these reports don't say how often the companies
> are doing this on their own.
> 
> It's a question that came to the fore this week when Microsoft helped U.S.
> authorities arrest Alex Kibkalo, a Microsoft employee who allegedly leaked
> company secrets to an outside blogger. Microsoft identified Kibkalo after
> rummaging through the blogger's private email account, which happened to run
> on its own email service, Hotmail.
> 
> All of the big web companies have detailed privacy policies, but they
> generally give themselves broad rights to access customer email if they're
> protecting their own rights, says Nicole Ozer, technology and civil
> liberties policy director at the ACLU. "This situation should be a bit of a
> wakeup call," she says of the Microsoft incident. "These email services are
> not free. We're playing a high price for these email services when we click,
> 'I agree.'"
> 
> How big of a wakeup call? On Thursday, after fielding questions from
> reporters about the Kibkalo situation, Microsoft suddenly announced that, in
> its bi-annual transparency reports, it will start publishing information
> about how often it accesses private customer data in this way.
> 
> That's a major policy change. Here's what led to the incident. Upset over a
> bad performance review, Kibkalo allegedly leaked an unreleased version of
> Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system to a blogger in France. According to
> court documents, the August 18, 2012, Windows leak sparked an intense
> internal investigation, and the turning point came in September 2012, when
> an unnamed source tipped off Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's
> Windows Division at the time.
> 
> The source gave Sinofsky a Hotmail address that belonged to the French
> blogger (also not named) and said that the blogger was the person who had
> received the leaked software. Microsoft had already been interested in the
> blogger, but apparently, after the tip-off, the company's security team did
> something that raised alarm bells with privacy advocates. Instead of taking
> their evidence to law enforcement, they decided to search through the
> blogger's private messages themselves. Four days after Sinofsky's tip-off,
> Microsoft lawyers "approved content pulls of the blogger's Hotmail account,"
> the court filings state.
> 
> By trolling through the Hotmail email messages and MSN Messenger instant
> message logs, Microsoft learnt how Kibkalo and the blogger pulled off the
> leak, says Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Armando Ramirez
> III, in an affidavit filed in connection with the case. Microsoft handed
> over the results of its investigation to the FBI in 2013, and Kibkalo was
> arrested on Wednesday.
> 
> In a statement, Microsoft said that this kind of search happens "only in the
> most exceptional circumstances." But the company couldn't say how many of
> these searches it has done in the past.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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