Does Brazil not have ...
... a secure, air-gapped network for proprietary government systems?
The mind fucking boggles ... numpties.
A week after joining a consortium calling for the USA's currently cold, dead, fingers to be pried off the internet's internal machinery, Brazil has announced that it will develop a secure e-mail system to try and protect its government-level communications against American spying. The nation's President Dilma Rousseff used the …
LOL - of course we all think we have good secure systems but quite honestly, most of the time we just think that - anyone here old enough to remember TEMPEST?
It strikes me that there's an opportunity here for a secure email provider to set up shop in South America and offer services around the world.
I doubt any nation in the world would accept having a peek at the NSA database as recompense for the loss of their security.
If I discovered the landlord at my local pub was pissing in the beer, him letting me have a piss in it also, isn't a solution, nor would his promises of never to piss in mine again be trusted.
No, it's time to find another provider, yes they too might be pissing in the beer, but at least there's a chance they might not, that they may prefer customers to having a slash in the barrel?
This is supposed to be secure email for within the Brazilian government and not about the rest of the world.
Yes, most of El Reg readers know and have known for years that email is, in almost every case, as secure as a post card, but it still ends up being used with some expectation of privacy. Now they know, rather than suspect, that the NSA hoovered it all up (J Edgar'd it up?) they feel it is something to bring back under national control.
As for the rest of us, until we can get and manage some sort of open/free public key system and have an interoperable email standard that "just works" for kids to granny's computers without any technical knowledge, then we (as in the public) are still out in the open.
Apologies. I bounced through the article after a long day and assumed that (yeah, assumed) they were talking about secure intertubes for everyone; and that -furthermore- they had some semblance of organisational skills.
But actually, if you read the article, it's an attempted power grab.
If the Brazilian government don't have private email then it's their own damned fault and they should be ashamed.
---Begin invoice-----8<------------------------
ATTENTION BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT
Stop using Gmail
</massively expensive consultancy>
That'll be $5000 USD, thankyouverymuch
---End invoice--------8<------------------------
P.S. Setting up your own email isn't that hard.