Brazil arrests Facebook executive in row over police access to data

http://news.yahoo.com/brazil-arrests-facebook-executive-row-over-police-data-155215319.html

by mauricioc • 10 years ago

97 53 10 years ago

news.yahoo.com

ng-user3• 10 years ago

God I'm happy Yahoo is dying, that was disgusting to read.

adamlaiacano• 10 years ago

Yeah, that's the spirit!

ng-user3• 10 years ago

The quality of the website is what I was referring to, I apologize for not making it obvious.

spacehome• 10 years ago

Um, "Don't shoot the messenger"???

ng-user3• 10 years ago

Guess I didn't make it obvious enough, their website is what I found disgusting.

dmoy• 10 years ago

Judges in Brazil certainly have a way with foreign companies & countries. For example with immigration issues (fingerprinting[1], random deportations) they will go tit for tat.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/12/30/brazil.usa.immi...

caiob• 10 years ago

Simple reciprocity.

x5n13• 10 years ago

All governments should extend the courtesy that US extends to their citizens to Americans entering their country. Perhaps that will encourage Americans to encourage their government to treat non-Americans better.

nibs• 10 years ago

(Non-serious): I think it would be funny to shut down the Facebook account of all senior Brazillian officials. 2006-Zuck would definitely do it but 2016-Zuck probably had dinner with them and promised to create lots of local jobs.

nickpsecurity4• 10 years ago

Greenwald at The Intercept writes a lot about American spying and overreach in data access. I'll be interested to see what he writes about Brazil's activities such as this.

csandreasen• 10 years ago

Probably about as much as you see from him on the subject of Russia and China. The Intercept is about as unbiased as Fox News - lots of criticism directed towards the US and its allies, silence on every other country.

guelo• 10 years ago

Journalists have beats. It's ridiculous to expect Greenwald to report on every government in the world.

zghst2• 10 years ago

For some reason, true oppressive regimes aren't worth reporting on anymore.

bicknergseng• 10 years ago

Didn't know that "focus" == "bias".

celticninja2• 10 years ago

Lets be fair here:

1: Greenwald is an American so the actions of the US government are relevant to him and his readers.

2: Greenwald is a lawyer, trained in US law, therefore the actions of the US Government vis-a-vis US Law is a suitable topic for him to cover.

3. China and Russia have been oppressing their people and their peoples rights for a long time. Neither have a constitution that is supposed to enshrine the rights of the citizens. SO there isnt much of a story there i.e. russians have no constitutional right to privacy, when that privacy is invaded by the state because the state has enacted laws that allow it to do that, there is no story. Plus even if there were there are probably russina lawyers and journal;ists who would be more knowledgeable on the subject and could bring it to the awareness of their russian readers. I doubt many russian media watchers read a lot of greenwald.

4. The US sells itself as the land of the free, so their hypocrisy makes the story worthwhile/interesting. China and Russia have never really hidden the fact that they will spy on anyone and everyone that they can. US says "we are your friends" and then spies on everyone regardless of their status as friend or foe.

But you know handy to throw in a straw man argument to try and deflect attention away from the US government and make the journalist the bad guy in this situation.

burkaman• 10 years ago

I guess Greenwald doesn't write much about Russia much, but The Intercept has other writers that focus on other countries.

In the past two weeks:

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/19/for-russia-censors-only-...

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/17/the-horror-story-of-publ...

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/15/putin-doesnt-need-to-cen...

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/24/bahrain-finds-opposition...

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/23/egypt-bars-journalist-fr...

Obviously there's more if you look further back. They did a whole documentary series on the Greek austerity deal, for example.

thefastlane• 10 years ago

ah, the ol' "biased as fox news!" rhetorical device.

nandemo4• 10 years ago

Come on, people. Why so many people ITT automatically associating this with "spying" (really?) or even overreach?

Our government aren't making requests secretly. They aren't requesting data in bulk. They aren't asking for a backdoor.

They are requesting data about specific people who are suspects in a specific case. Essentially using a search warrant.

nickpsecurity4• 10 years ago

That could be true. I'd expect him to be covering something significant in his home country. Interestingly enough, one Google led me to a huge piece from his former employer:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/nov/26/seco...

https://www.cpj.org/2012/02/attacks-on-the-press-in-2011-bra...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/11/28/the-c...

Most interesting is the Petrobas scandal. The lead rep of government's side of the Snowden debate on Schneier's blog kept arguing spying on Brazil was legitimate, esp Petrobas. He said they're more an instrument of the state than a typical company and probably highly corrupt. That could lead to problems for the U.S. that leverage from spying could help deal with. Brazil is in process of proving him right.

So, there, I've done more to get word out to Brazilians than Greenwald has his whole time living there. :P

dudus• 10 years ago

Brazil also arrested Google Brazil CEO/Country Manager a few years ago.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/tech/brazil-google/

tathastu• 10 years ago

Brazil may be shooting themselves in the foot -- they're trying to create an innovation industry around Sao Paulo and these things will just create a chilling effect that chases a huge bunch of industries out of the country.

vaadu• 10 years ago

What if FB fired the VP? Pay him a nice severance, pay his legal fees but cut him off from being able to comply with the court order.

At that point the authorities are left holding the bag.

zghst2• 10 years ago

Then they go to the next guy in line.

justinclift• 10 years ago

Wonder if they would hire someone already in prison, purely to be a placeholder...? :D

nandemo4• 10 years ago

No need to fire anyone. They should hire a legal team that either 1) makes sure the company is able to provide data requested by the Brazilian justice system requests, 2) enables the company to legally refuse such requests.

Though maybe your point is that it is the VP that has the responsibility of taking care of that? In that case I'd agree with you.

maze-le• 10 years ago

makes sure the company is able to provide data requested

How should that be possible if FB doesn't store this information in the first place? I mean, if there would be a legal requirement for data retention on behalf of the state, I could understand the issue. But there isn't...

edcastro2• 10 years ago

Put simply, they are in contempt of the court disregarding the subpoena. This, under Brazilian law, warrants the arrest.

They could fight the subpoena but decided to do nothing, so, I kinda agree with the court on this one.

envy2• 10 years ago

It's not that simple: it seems that the issue isn't that WhatsApp/Facebook have wilfully disregarded the subpoena, but rather that Brazil isn't happy with their assertions that the information requested doesn't exist. WhatsApp has previously stated publicly that they don't retain any messages once they're delivered; if this is true, it's not strictly that they aren't willing to comply (though this may also be true), it's that they can't comply.

edcastro2• 10 years ago

I agree, and if they CAN'T comply, they should address it on the court, not on a public statement that has no valid legal value.

That's what it comes to. The court requested three times, increasing the fines each of the tries and it was received with [legal] silence from Facebook. That's why they went ahead and issued the arrest warrant.

danielmantovani4• 10 years ago

Just to clarify stupid arguments. The federal police was asking information like ip address from organised crime pages, they use Facebook as other social network pages(In this case actually we are talking about Whatsapp). Don't have ANYTHING TO DO WITH SPY CITIZENS. Like PCC(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital) has an official facebook page. There is many people in Brazil who stole cellphones, kill people and post on Facebook(Yeh, I know is ridiculous dumb, but people does). Definitely the IP address will help the cops. Please stop to talk about stupid spy conspiracy without understand the "why". They arrested Facebook's VP because they don't know what to do anymore, because Facebook always deny the justice requests. Oh, if you think that they are protecting your data, you are just dumb as a stone, they are just protecting them self.

(Sorry for my poor english, it isn't my first or second language.)

Artur_Gaspar3• 10 years ago

As someone commented, it could be the case that Facebook/WhatsApp does not even have the data any more. Also, WhatsApp operates as a separate business from Facebook. In my opinion this looks a lot more like a display of power by the government, than an actual effort in the investigation.

I don't see either how Facebook would be "protecting themselves". They have little to gain and much to lose by not cooperating with the government. It's not about publicity because it wouldn't have made the news at all if they complied.

Now, even mentioning the following may be going into conspiracy theory territory, but telephone companies were trying to get WhatsApp banned not long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if this event would further their goals.

danielmantovani4• 10 years ago

Do you really believe that Facebook/WhatsApp don't have the data ? Please we are in 2016, data is everything! Don't you think they sell or use our data for an infinite kind of applications like send ads ? Analysing our personal data like WhatsApp and Facebook they can have so minimum details about us and classify in really minimum groups of "publicity". The mankind never in history had so mach data and ways(powerful computers) to compute it like today. it is not a stupid conspiracy theory, Google does read our email to sell ads and it is in the ToS. The question is, just because it isn't in the ToS it doesn't exist ? And nobody can investigate it ?

pmarreck2• 10 years ago

Try and struggle through this please

http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

Or read the google-translated version into Portuguese

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=pt&js=y&pr...

It explains very well why this is no trivial issue to Americans nor to tech people.

Also, your drugs should be legalized or decriminalized, anyway. It would put all the bad guys out of business and bring the entire drug market back within regulation. Portugal did it and it's considered a success, why can't Brazil?

schoen2• 10 years ago

That article includes a link to an official Portuguese translation, which is still available at

http://lixo.org/blog/2013/08/05/privacidade-protege-pessoas-...

danielmantovani4• 10 years ago

Is really hard to separe what should be known and what should not. Like is total absolute right for many reasons as repression write about an government in anonymous. But it is right spread a video from a naked girl from work who got drunk and slept with you ? That's happen EVERY SINGLE DAY here in Brazil, guys take advantage from girls and screw up they life. Would be quick easy track the first person who did share the video, and this morons in most of the times don't think in use a proxy, Tor or something like. Because if they could think, they would never destroy a person's life doing such stupidness in exception psychopaths.

nandemo4• 10 years ago

First,

For many people, privacy is a fundamental right - they see no reason why a government should be meddling in my affairs without a more specific reason than a blanket search for possible terrorism.

... this is not about blanket searches, and:

I'm not saying that privacy is an absolute. Foiling criminal activity often means breaching privacy - a database of phone calls can be helpful tool to investigate a criminal network.

piva00• 10 years ago

Because Brazil is a huge country with a far less educated society as the Portuguese, with a lot of conservatives (evangelicals pastors who only scam are just an example of what 10~20% of our Deputies Chamber looks like) politicians who push their agendas that drugs are devil's things and every drug addict should be in jail.

And I say that as a Brazilian, you're comparing an European country with 10 million people (that's less than what my hometown of São Paulo has, now sitting at 11.8 million as of 2014 census) to a country of 200+ million of mostly uneducated people.

Sorry to tell you but you don't change a whole society way of thinking in less than a generation, much less when there's no politicians' desire for that.

Yeah, anyway it should be decriminalized (as it's for users right now) or legalized, but if you want to be real about it, come up with a plan, because realistically speaking there's no way to do it in the next 10~15 years.

yeahrightfam• 10 years ago

Brazil is a sovereign country and they are free to define their legal system any way they want. Facebook needs to comply with Brazilian law, not the other way around.

If you do something illegal you should expect punishment from the law sooner or later.

Artur_Gaspar3• 10 years ago

I'm not saying Facebook is right, but following the law isn't necessarily the right thing to do, neither need one always expect punishment.

Brazil arrests Facebook executive in row over police access to data

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