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(Reuters) Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia.
At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance. According to other sources, the construction is scheduled to begin in July.
A joint venture between Brazilian telecoms provider Telebras and Spain's IslaLink Submarine Cables would lay the communications link. Telebras would have a 35 percent stake, IslaLink would have a 45 percent interest and European and Brazilian pension funds could put up the remainder.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by r00t on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:08PM
Segregation at layer 1 makes sense, but only if you can validate the rest of the hardware. How do you know the Juniper and Cisco gear you've purchased to connect everything hasn't been backdoored? Those companies would most likely be under a gag order preventing them from divulging any indication of the sort.
Once you've got that part figured out, you need to audit the encryption algorithms you will use in order to make sure those haven't had intentional weaknesses built in as well. After ALLLLLL that, then you need to make sure the nodes on the network do not get phished or otherwise compromised. And that's mostly impossible. How will those nodes on the segregated network get Email? What Search Engines will they be using? All it takes is one piece of malicious software to compromise a node on the segregated network and all that security has gone out the window because the person who schedules so-and-so's meetings clicked the popup and inadvertently installed a reverse ssh connection to some node on the "real" internet.
It's great that there are countries making active efforts to segregate themselves. It also conceivably opens the possibility of alternative VPN traffic for others but to actually implement "FU! we'll make our own internet! with booze and hookers!" Is far easier to implement in theory than practice.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:35PM
By using gear produced by that France HQ-ed company... what's its name... you know, the one that has some routers 5 times faster [cnn.com] than the competition?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by r00t on Tuesday February 25 2014, @05:04PM
RE: By using gear produced by that France HQ-ed company.
Indeed! Wouldn't that be a nice situation for that company to fall into? In all seriousness however, a scenario such as the one proposed by Brazil is the perfect antithetical to proprietary "black box" hardware and vended solutions. It is an ideal case for open source software, but sadly this also requires proprietary hardware. Perhaps this situation will bring about the advent of a wide adoption of truly open standards, hardware, bios, file formats, etc, etc. It's really the only way to perform a subjective audit based on your security needs. In this situation, even a company on "home ground" could be bribed for a price. The key comes down to being able to conduct and end-to-end audit of the entire infrastructure and having numbers and metrics to prove that everything is the it should be.