Thursday, September 19, 2013

Is independent Internet possible?

By name itself, Internet in network of networks.. how can you make it independent? I guess, you can only do it by creating island and controlling gateways for inbound and outbound traffic from your country to another if there is any such well defined things..

I totally understand President Dilma's anger on US. Is she also angry at China (her biggest buyer of raw materials) and Russia and many other countries/nations who do it all the time? Instead of getting angry at US, she should focus on more emphasis on technological build up in Brazil... then she can launch her counter offensive against any country she would like to as most of the other countries do it to her country..

Build infrastructure in your country so Google/facebook like companies are created in your own country rather than relying on silicon valley for all such critical to time passing applications and infrastructures.. Attack at fundamentals.. don't try to dress up the fact that your country let go the golden time of minting money on your natural resources without fixing core issues like infrastructure and education.. Now that you are facing the anemic growth music again, you are creating issues out of almost non-sense issues..

Work on fundamentals.. rest nature will take care of you..





Angered over espionage, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is postponing a visit to Washington.



Brazil seeks online independence


President angered over revelations of U.S. spying


By Bradley Brooks and Frank Bajak


Associated Press


RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month’s scheduled trip to Washington.

Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government’s reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.
“The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months,” said Sascha Meinrath of the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank. “This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe.”

While Brazil isn’t proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians’ Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.

The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet’s open, interconnected structure.

The effort by Latin America’s biggest
 economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say.

In December, countries advocating greater “cyber-sovereignty” pushed for such control at an International Telecommunications Union meeting in Dubai, with Western democracies led by the United States and the European Union in opposition.

U.S. digital security expert Bruce Schneier says that while Brazil’s response is a rational reaction to NSA spying, it is likely to embolden “some of the worst countries out there to seek more control over their citizens’ Internet. That’s Russia, China, Iran and Syria.”

Brazil is now pushing more aggressively than any other nation to end U.S. commercial hegemony on the Internet. More than 80 percent of online search, for example, is controlled by U.S.-based companies.

Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network
 free of U.S. eavesdropping.

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