You're commenting on the news of their enforcement. They are completely fine with blocking Telegram nation-wide until they reveal the user data and pay the fine.
Don't give me that "good luck" speech either. The article mentions the same judges blocked Telegram last year. I submitted news of that here and people here gave me the exact same "lol good luck telegram didn't even submit to Russia" response. A few days later I got the news that Telegram paid the fine.
Paying the fine and providing the user data basically renders the whole service pointless, right? It is better to be blocked in Brazil than to be useless everywhere I guess.
I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines.
Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
I find it fascinating that Telegram is (and was back when they tried to block it) the most popular messenger and possibly even social network in Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, for crying out loud, writes his thuggish notes on Telegram, from which they then get propagated by mass media. Ramzan Kadyrov, too, posts to Telegram. It's so embarrassing to see after their attempt to block it for some reason.
There's a law for the internet in Brazil, called Marco Civil, which literally states that ISPs can be blocked and forbidden from providing services if they don't comply with takedown requests issued by the authorities.
They were blocked quite a few times in the past 4-5 years. If I remember correctly there was a time that it was blocked for up to 2 days because they were deciding if they should pay the fine and hand over the data, or remain blocked.
I totally disagree with these rulings in favor of blocking social media apps (even though it could do us good by banning or difficulting disinformation from reaching people), but you do realize that Telegram is not the app it used to be or should be anymore, right? Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.
So, if you think you are safe using Telegram, think again.
VK was stolen from him and given to people who were friends with the regime.
So yes, VK is heavily monitored and controlled by Russian authorities and it seems a good deal of effort went into preventing that from happening again.
If Russia TRULY wanted to block Telegram, then Mr. Durov, who accidentally operates from and resides in Russia, would have been kidnapped and tortured until Telegram goes down or he hands the keys over to KGB.
Since Durov is still alive and free... the conclusion is kind of obvious.
https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/
Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.
I think you're mistaken, unless there was an incredibly rapid sequence of events in this case.
https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grup...
Seção Judiciária do Espírito Santo 1ª Vara Federal de Linhares [...] assinado por WELLINGTON LOPES DA SILVA
That would be a first instance (trial) court, not any kind of appellate court. (Though in the Federal judiciary rather than the state judiciary.)
What do you mean? Didn't they have an election that the incumbent lost (for very good reasons I might add, anyone who bungles the Covid response that bad doesn't deserve to remain in power regardless of anything else (and there was a lot of "else")) recently, implying democracy and all that?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
Note: The original first amendment was: "WE DECLARE, That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that all power is inherent in the PEOPLE; and that all free governments are, and of right ought to be, founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and well being. For the advancement of these ends, the PEOPLE have, at all times, an indefeasible right to alter and reform their government."
That one was never ratified.
> Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attac...
This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun .
I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech.
Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups. There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations.
Disclosure: I own xx coins.
Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
It was something to behold. Took a lot of guts to take the entire cabinet of ministers to task for failing to protect brazilians against errant bureaucracy. Too bad the video seems to not be in youtube anymore
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
That's assuming the judge actually followed the law and the constitution, which isn't obvious at all in this case.
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
They are not. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. Yet I don't think it's been a month since I last saw news of some politician being banned from holding office because they posted "fake news" online or something.
Basically the strategy now is to criminalize "fake news", accuse your opponents of spreading it and deplatform them because criminals can't hold political office. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian even if it has nominally democratic institutions like North Korea or Iraq under the Ba'ath party. To be sure, the word is bandied about a lot in political discourse as in the comment you replied to, but it is well-defined.
When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.
Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.
A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
> a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article
What scandal are you referring to? I'd like to read about it. Let's make some Streisand magic happen!
Who draws the line? First Nazi propaganda spreaders, then gay rights activists?
Sounds extremely dangerous to have this kind of centralized control.
The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run
They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.
> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life
Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!
I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.
There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.
Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats.
That said, I agree that Durov probably is not closely collaborating with the Russian state.
Chances are ALWAYS against regular people.
While in the same reality aggressively fight TOR, block VPNs, enforce passport registration, etc. etc. There's even a man jailed for running a tor node!
The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.
Their algorithm itself is proven and published, has been audited multiple times already.
It is not as good Double Ratchet in terms of features but security wise, it's solid.
When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
Brazilian government is already speaking of giving judges and politicians total power to censor things on the internet. They're speaking of "autonomous internet supervision entities". Yeah.
The problem is, short of banning encryption altogether, you cannot prevent people from communicating in near perfect secrecy. If a criminal (or neo-Nazi, or homophobic, or whatever scapegoat you want to use) organization wants to communicate secretly, they will have means of doing so. All it takes is single programmer to write the custom application, and a single AWS instance to relay the data.
By banning Telegram or enforcing government rules, you're only taking away privacy from ordinary folks, while doing effectively nothing to those who you're claiming to fight against.
...and no, this is not an argument for banning encryption. I hope that part is obvious.
There's 195 nations on this planet. Should every company lower themselves below every nation? Without question? There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
These nations are on the internet. It's an unplace to connect all places. If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so. The whole world doesn't bend to your local rules, it doesn't alter the rules of the entire internet.
I'm glad I got to experience the true internet. It was great while it lasted. Truly a wonder of humanity.
My honest response to this would be: “yes, if they want to do business in said country”. Otherwise we end up where we’ve been, with Facebook being the sole way to access internet in some places. Why should an organization seeking to make a profit hold more sway than the institutions that allow such a profit to be made in the first place (not to mention the protection of their citizens).
To be clear, I realize that in practice, many governments don’t operate in as much good faith as I’d like. But I’d also argue that’s largely due to business holding outsized sway across the globe.
> There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
There is no inherent right to do business internationally. Requiring that companies adhere to the laws wherever they choose to operate is hardly unreasonable. If they cannot comply — if the logistics are too expensive — then obviously they’re not successful enough to expand into these new countries.
But the idea that companies — where the ultimate goal is profit — should outrank governments — where the ultimate goal is a functioning society — seems ludicrous when stated plainly. The fact that our current society is largely modeled by outsized corporate influence is proof of that.
One can argue that not all governments, or even most, seek a functioning society in the way I’ve described. But even then, one must realize that the governments in question are beholden to corporate interests.
All the way back to the East India Company and beyond, one can demonstrate that globalized corporate influence harms society. So these are hardly ridiculous questions to ask.
If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so
Yeah yeah, nothing is ever our problem, it's always someone else's problem and other people's problems are stupid. Do you not realize how head-up-the-ass that sounds? A lot of regular people hate techies because they celebrate disruption and software 'eating the world' (including many people's livelihood and communities) while shrugging off any kind of collective responsibility.
What about when some group of people have legitimate beef?
Fortunately, nobody is forcing them to do business in Russia. But doing so entails acceptance of whatever local rules there are, including rules the vast majority of people might consider wrong.
I can promise you that Facebook & Co happily hand information on any individual to US law enforcement as long as there is a court order. They don't look at the person in question and then decide based on their own sense of morality whether they "should" supply that information. They simply do it.
These simple declarations of what people feel is true and right are ... I dunno, is the right expression "charmingly naive"?
This is a really weak defeatist position.
Brazil's administration is attempting to silence opposition voices, this has nothing to do with Nazis. Much like the EU uses "hate speech" laws to silence mass immigration skeptics, this is a political measure to silence people.
Because this was literally a nazi group called ""卐 Frente Anti-Semita 卐""
The current government isn't like the last one, that actually used the intelligence machine to attack opposition voices.
Law kind of exists.
It's not even clear that who they were looking for had broken any laws
