Brazilians tear strip off NSA in wake of Snowden, mull anti-US-spook law

They can do it with profits

I'm sure if they can develop structures to keep taxable money out of a country, proprrly motivated, their laywers can do the same to keep data at arms length.

It isn't like alternatives aren't available

It isn't like there aren't alternatives to all these 'big data' companies already available. Not always as convenient as selling your life up the river to FB et.al. but still more-or-less usable.

I killed my (already seldom-used) FB presence a few weeks ago and I'm only holding off enacting my own Diasporia* pod until I see slightly better data migration across major version upgrades, which I am quite sure is in the works.

I switched to StartPage just today after a fellow commentard in another thread made me aware of it (been using DDG for some time on-and-off but I need images searches quite a bit in some of what I do for both fun and profit).

...

Sucks to be a US-based data company today. Really, I honestly think it must!

I can see.this getting popular..

Want to do business in our country?

You have to do the data processing here for National security reasons.

Processing data in our country?

You must pay full national taxes on all your sales then. Try claiming you have no local presence now!

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Be careful what you wish for

State of Fear by Michael Crichton says it all. I'm surprised it's not on the list of prohibited books.

temperature?

"There are a lot of datacenter-related issues already... even the temperature, which makes it expensive to run those facilities in Brazil,"

Doesn't Google have massive server farms in the US desert?! Sounds like Mr Beers is making excuses.

Musings on how to fight back against government intrusion of internet privacy

The easy way IMHO is to decrease the Signal to Noise Ratio(SNR) better known as spam

in the world of the internet

Within email spam is noise and the email you want is the signal, but how to increase the noise

in a way that it does not affect our use of the internet, but hampers those that are snooping our data,

if we consider recent reports of NSA/GCHQ snooping it seems that for the most part they filter out noise

in the form of bittorrents, video, audio streaming etc and go for encrypted and none encrypted messages.

These include email, facebook post etc all of which in terms of bandwidth to the likes of the NSA/GCHQ and even the average user today, are very small, consider just how much text information is contained in a gigabyte of email(~1 hour 720p video)

Therefore we need to only increase the noise in the encrypted section to have an adverse effect on SNR to the snoopers, but increasing the use of encryption detracts from ease of use, trying to teach ones mother how to use encryption really is a none starter.

However we are talking about increasing noise here and not about every day communications, here are a few ideas

1. Install bitmessage (bitmessage.org) and of course use it, if you so wish. However just installing and running the program will start the sending and receiving of encrypted traffic.

2. When emailing or messaging friends & family the more tech savvy can attach GPG(Gnu Privacy Guard) encrypted documents, telling the receiver the attachment is just 'a security enhancement' (or whatever story you wish) and they do not need to worry about it. The security services of course have no option but to worry, it could be you are sneaking something through.

3. Adding small GPG messages to forums posts or in emails using the same explanation as item 2, such as

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

Version: GnuPG v2.0.21-beta27 (MingW32)

hQEMA9br7so/5TliAQf/VG/SJIVabBEOHPKNNDRgU8BfCvUjkCHcauPGRNuojqLZ

qFJURqkGAYYzplv/dCaWIXVTbfLRgc0XHTqKv1bpKEgcRacGCZvYUE86fi4tN35X

AN4ExgBdi6av0UBPlR622UesaHEuinlxANB4yZRyQyRA5ygvA3ZZutXMs/WDI3MH

/bo0WTjfwuwfoR6B1OedbzTifKyxXjCas2Efv3d4AzvFVnA0kKPHMbkYKrl6x3Y3

2Gam6D3Ly+fEkC30jOCZB/U1zWbhGfMgSuLs2i7RzxPYvLERk86nj74LAYwVSAdW

AxlhXa+qQKDHtOCSustmiHRYMwub1D3fsPZZWFCD1dKZAV8ErFwPKGkMAvveFkXO

0HN0ra7eHe/INX3Tez2y11NoXYG8LZHvoi9ML+36X0Ql8FtzC5tbyF39OlBNq9vG

igO+WTaQjJJ3VQIfMylnizkrjWyVtmx4+doyX4/J1n7QCWEVVHcA5KixcV1t/SjA

QCsJiYizWauGifhh/FpTzhSgpdnIHBJRuTZpYyKIYXLGhGqiryhMLps5

=thJT

-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

You could of course put anything between the Begin & End tags provided it looks correct, however be aware of monkeys typing, just in case it does get decrypted!

Again it cannot be ignored by those snooping, though we have to be careful of forum rules and respect them.

4. It is important to add these measures at random, do not encrypt everything, don't always attach encrypted documents or include encrypted text blocks, noise should be as random as possible with nice spikes! This also has the advantage of making it less of a burden to implement.

To state the obvious the more people that do this the more noise is created, these are just a few examples to decrease the SNR to the snoops but have little impact upon most peoples internet usage.

Of course there is always the danger the bad guys could use this to cover their operations, but to my mind

this highlights the need for the state to engage its citizens in combating whatever the threat of the day is.

We are not stupid and wish to be involved in the running of our country as is our right, however treat us as

stupid and take away our rights and both the state and the citizens suffer. Other readers of this may have a different view, but then, that is democracy.

trust diminished

More and more the world distrusts the USA. To the point where nations legislate against their citizens' personal details being held on US servers. The US have really shot themselves in the foot over PRISM; I wonder if they will ever regain anyone's trust.

I always thought of Brasil as a huge waste dump, but i'm just an uneducated gringo. I think the reason the USA is becoming despised is because they publicly preach against spying on citizens etc when China does it...then it turns out the USA is doing all the same things, just more sneakily.

Here. There. Whatever

As can be seen by the recent incidents involving the GCHQ and the Brazilian partner of a Gardian publication reporter, it doesn't matter where your data is kept. All you have to do is be traveling through the wrong country and the Jack Boot Squad will "detain" you for questioning.

"Then if you add regulation that will present further obstacles, companies might end up moving their IT operations to other South American countries where the rules are not so strict."

That's right sweetheart. That's absolutely right. And that is what they should do. Get rid of any US based corporation and establish your own entities. Better still. Nationalize them and take them over with all that juicy US information on it. See how the yanks like having their privates probed.

Faceybook squashed

"Google and Facebook have both raised objections with the plans, according to an automated translation of a report by Agência Brasil."

I like the plan already.

Lacks IT skills? Too hot?

What idiotic comments by Beer. Few countries have the plentiful IT skills that Brazil has, and does he not realize that the country extends into the temperate south where it snows in the winter?

I recommend that you refer to David Miranda as Glenn Greenwald's husband or partner, rather than his boyfriend. When describing their relationship, Miranda consistently uses the term husband and Greenwald uses the term partner. I cannot remember any cases of the Register using the casual terms boyfriend and girlfriend to describe a marriage between straight people. Marriage equality is an important issue currently. Please do not disrespect Miranda and Greenwald's covenantal relationship.

Arrogance bordering on racism methinks

"There are a lot of datacenter-related issues already, such as the high cost of electricity, access to skills and even the temperature, which makes it expensive to run those facilities in Brazil," Bird said.

What does he think Brazil is? It's not a giant sinkhole of dimwits with a big forest out the back. I think that anyone giving even a moment's thought to what modern Brazil is like would surely realize that none of the above were really true.

- Electricity is cheap in the US because local pols throw money to attract data centers to their state. No reason why Brazil couldn't do the same (and, perhaps more creatively, you'd think having a bloody large river out the back might give someone some ideas about how to power or cool those servers).

- Access to skills is a strawman since Brazil is full of talented people just like the US is. There are, no doubt, also a large number of numpties, but that's not a uniquely Brazilian feature.

- The temperature. Really? REALLY? Because the US has such a jolly mild climate? C'mon. That is a feeble excuse.

Note to El Reg.

The comments here suggest several interesting avenues that El Reg could explore ... just what would be involved in setting up a local storage in any country? Given the TOR seems to be more effective at maintaining anonymity perhaps someone would like to think about building TOR into routers - a TOR box inserted between your home DSL/Cable connection would at least make things tougher to spy on than the current unencrypted methods. Failing that a router that sent everything through a VPN to an anonymizer service ... all "projects" that El Reg might find more useful than LOHAN - not that I'm knocking LOHAN but in the general scheme of things ... it's a bit fluffy.

So folks - how about some "how to" articles?

Ha, Ha, Ha

Da boyfriend ain't too happy and things are going to get even worse for leakers and those who conspire.