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Brazil was not bluffing last year, when it said that it wanted to disconnect from the United States-controlled internet due to the NSA's obscenely invasive surveillance tactics. The country is about to stretch a cable from the northern city of Fortaleza all the way to Portugal, and they've vowed not to use a single U.S. vendor to do it.
At first glance, Brazil's plan to disconnect from the U.S. internet just seemed silly. The country was not happy when news emerged that the NSA's tentacles stretched all the way down to Brazil. And the country was especially not happy when news emerged that the NSA had been spying on the Brazilian government's email for years. But really, what are you gonna do?
Brazil made a bunch of bold promises, ranging in severity from forcing companies like Facebook and Google to move their servers inside Brazilian borders, to building a new all-Brazilian email system—which they've already done. But the first actionable opportunity the country was presented with is this transatlantic cable, which had been in the works since 2012 but is only just now seeing construction begin. And with news that the cable plan will not include American vendors, it looks like Brazil is serious; it's investing $185 million on the cable project alone. And not a penny of that sum will go to an American company.
http://gizmodo.com/brazils-keeping-its-promise-to-disconnect-from-the-u-s-1652771021
[Additional Coverage]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-30/brazil-to-portugal-cable-shapes-up-as-anti-nsa-case-study.html
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hoochiecoochieman on Friday October 31 2014, @12:35PM
Worldwide industrial espionage performed by a small group of extremely dishonest and treacherous nations for the benefit of their own elites is "keeping everyone honest"???
Are you fucking kidding?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @06:38PM
Just a few?
Here's a list of the intelligence agencies belonging to 114 countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies [wikipedia.org] .
Not cheerleading for the concept and/or use of these agencies, or what they do, but in the real world, each and every one of these agencies aspires to be just like those in the US- If they had the resources and skill sets, they would be. It would be nice if the world wasn't like that, but the hard fact is that it is.
The 10% of the high-functioning sociopaths in this world have risen to power, and in corporations and government (is there a difference?) is where you'll find them.
You're not a sociopath, so this concept is offensive to you, and rightly so. There is too much power tied up in these institutions for anything less than the collapse of society, world-wide, to remove them, so I would suggest that putting idealism, moral outrage, and wishful thinking aside for a while would allow you to deal with the consequences of their existence and behaviors more to your benefit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:58PM
b- b- but the stasi were just trying to prevent germans from renazifying and that worked! ha ha... "The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions."(wikipedia) This is about meme suppression and controlling freedom of expression through self censorship; not honesty or morality.