Starlink's financial assets frozen in Brazil | Hacker News Reader

Starlink's financial assets frozen in Brazil

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53 pointskapkapkap69 comments

Does anyone know where we can find a copy of the official order? So far, I only found the previous one (https://noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnoticias/stf-intima-elon-mu... has a link to it).

(The twitter link isn't working for me, it only shows an error message followed by a reload link, so I don't know whether it has a link to a copy of the official order.)

https://g1-globo-com.translate.goog/politica/noticia/2024/08...

I couldn't find the original order anywhere, but I could find a later order rejecting Starlink's request against this order: https://noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnoticias/stf-rejeita-acao-c... (direct link: https://noticias-stf-wp-prd.s3.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-co...).

I see a lot of commenters here holding up Brazil's actions to an American yardstick. If you want to do buisiness abroad you have to follow their rules and their norms. They may well have the legal right to revoke charters, size assetts or more in persuit of the collection of a fine. The Oglobo article makes clear they have violated the law. https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/noticia/2024/08/29/moraes-...

> If you want to do buisiness abroad you have to follow their rules and their norms.

If you want to attract business you have to create a reliable and fair system that people can trust in. Once you break that, it is near impossible to regain.

While true, "reliable" and "fair" don't necessarily have to bend to what foreigners think they should mean.

Heck, Americans don't even agree with each other what those things mean in contexts like this.

You won't ever have a common definition thereof, but looking at capital and human movement, a lot more people trust the US than Brazil with their money and lives.

Indeed, though the stuff the judge here is trying to deal with — regardless of any considerations of if they're doing the right thing, just the problem itself — is in part related to making Brazil safer to live in than it was itself previously.

One could reasonably also argue that the drop-off of advertising to X is itself a sign of lack of trust in Musk's decision making process, his rules, and his reliability.

(And he bought Twitter while claiming Twitter's rules were unfair; as you say, no common agreement).

Why do we care?

If Starlink/Twitter/X doesn’t want to do business in BR or comply with local laws, then they are bound to suffer consequences (losing audience or assets seized).

Starlink and X are completely separate entities.

They are both privately owned by a dude that reinstated accounts that make threats against members of Brazil’s supreme court(1) and then recently tried to reframe it as a petty squabble about posting by posting weird angry AI-generated memes about a judge (2).

It is unsurprising to see somebody that’s actively trying to push the envelope about a country’s sovereignty be hit with sanctions on their business operations inside said country.

1 https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-twitter-moraes-bef0...

2 https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/elon-musk-posts-ai-phot...

This has been controversial in Brazil - not 100% clear cut. While suspending some of accounts making threats should be supported, de Moraes has been also going after what seem to be legit political activity

https://www-gazetadopovo-com-br.translate.goog/vida-e-cidada...

Furthermore, instead of banning the accounts upfront, for disputed casese, it would seem to be a fair to have court process for the people involved and let them defend their behaviour.

> Last week, the Supreme Court justices ruled on six appeals filed by Twitter, Telegram, TikTok, Google (owner of YouTube) and Meta (the group that controls Facebook and Instagram) against Moraes' decision in a virtual session. They all unanimously considered that blocking all channels, profiles and accounts of a person or party is an act of prior censorship, something expressly prohibited by the Constitution and also clearly rejected by the Internet Civil Rights Framework, in respect of freedom of expression.

Yes, on paper. The legal action against Starlink has claimed that they're being considered part of the same economic group for being controlled by the same private owner, who is considered direct responsible for the violations of one of them. Which is true.

Separate legal entities, according to the US legal system, yes. But they definitely aren't completely separate entities. It isn't like Brazil targeted Starlink at random.

Not to Elon Musk they are not. He uses all them as leverage to get favorable deals for his other companies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41281756

In the practical sense, Twitter is the marketing arm of all his other companies. My theory was that he was acting out belligerently against the Brazillian government because his other companies had minimal or no presence in Brazil. Didn't think of Starlink presence frankly.

Regardless, since he himself uses Twitter as quid pro quo with other governments, I'm guessing he saw this move a mile away.

Because it's fundamentally unreasonable to hold one company responsible for the actions of another on the basis of a common shareholder and executive? The rule of law (or at least the generally consistent appearance of it) is far preferable to the open rule of man in wantonly levelling attacks against everyone and everything associated with someone that a government official dislikes.

Yes. Legal insecurity.

As a Brazilian citizen, X / Musk have broken the law and have been fined. The fines are meant to compensate for damages done against my country. I absolutely want that debt to be paid. Moraes, within the boundaries of the law, has seized assets from another company that belongs to the same individual who's committing those crimes and is trying to evade punishment by closing the fined company. This should never be allowed to be used as a means to evade punishment.

From where I'm standing, this is legal security - not the opposite. In fact, I don't know if the law would allow it, but morally I would be fine with Musk being given a prison order or other sanctions for using such artifices in an attempt to evade justice.

What damage did Elon musk do to your country?

You have no idea how much disinformation there is in Brazil. Its basically 24/7 information warfare there, from both sides. I have family there, I was blown away by how aggressive it all was when visiting last year.

The only time they tried to do tracking on where these posts and sockpuppets were coming from, they ended up in Israel (this is a common practice, I'm assuming to make tracing and legal action more difficult. In Portugal the bots come from Angola).

Its clear that the same disinformation farms that are running in the US were duplicated to Brazil, by the same people (Bob Mercer / Steve Bannon). Proof of that was of course, the deeply personal relationship between Bannon and the Bolsonaro family (when he was out of jail he would visit all the time), and the faux January 6th that was replicated in Brazil after Bolsonaro's defeat.

You have to understand that the population of Brazil has A LOT less education than the population in the US or Europe. They are far more malleable to disinformation.

One of the worse examples I can think of is the disinformation campaign that was activated after the murder of Marielle Franco, who was tagged in fake photos with local Rio drug dealers - while she was still dead inside her car. So a few minutes after the murder, you had a giant disinformation campaign launched. Since it was so fast, the only reasonable conclusion is the murderers control a disinformation bot/sockpuppet farm.

Thanks for some context. Guess I will spend the weekend on the internet reading up on this

He ignored court orders, he broke the law. By (repeatedly) doing that, he enabled terrorist groups and disinformation networks to attack Brazilian society and democracy.

> has seized assets from another company that belongs to the same individual

He owns 42% share. What about the other owners who hold the other 58%? What have they done to deserve their assets seized?

Musk owns 42% of SpaceX, Starlink is a subsidiary.

I can't speak to SpaceX shareholders because they are private, but of the public Tesla that's also associated with Musk, there are shareholders who want him out because his public behaviour is interfering with the business interests, and that argument will gain weight as a result of stuff like this.

Is that "deserved" depends a great deal about how you model the entire world, but activists investors are a thing and they do fight company management.

In a working democratic system, this kind of deed should be malfeasance in office and in minimum lead to the termination of the employment

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malfeasance_in_office

Basically a wilful misconduct.

However the balance of powers in Brazil are different from common law, or are corrupted, so we see what comes out of this.

Is it unreasonable when the executive and shareholder in question is in their personal capacity flagrantly opposed to compliance and also professionally trying to avoid compliance with a previous court ruling by removing more pertinent assets? And the satellite network itself is a delivery mechanism if/when X gets blocked in Brazil, so there's reason to preemptively seize that given Musk's public statements on this topic.

(In case it isn't obvious: I'm not a lawyer, I've not really considered this in any depth beyond some other news sources besides this tweet, and this is a totally noob question that may have an answer in literally lawschool 101).

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/brazil-supreme-court-just...

I can't answer to legality since IANAL and systems vary anyways, but on a moral basis, yes, it is absolutely nonetheless unreasonable until SpaceX / Starlink actually commit an actionable offense of their own or otherwise demonstrate the intent to do so. It's outstandingly unreasonable and offensive to seize assets of such an entity without charging that specific entity with an offense; especially so when your basis is literally "I want to compel an unrelated venture with common beneficial ownership to unilaterally censor my political opponents worldwide".

AFAICT, Starlink complies with local regulations in the countries it operates in, including blocking access to specific IP prefixes and/or declining to default resolve DNS entries for specific domains.

Musk said you can use Starlink to circumvent the block if X gets blocked in Brazil.

IANAL but I'm pretty sure this is legal ground enough (plus all the shit Musk spits on Twitter, attacking Brazil and its institutions, a criminal offense in Brazil, from his ivory tower in Texas) to solicit a block of Starlink Holdings assets.

There are plenty of reasons out there to justify these actions and you can be sure Moraes will find them.

EDIT: Musk said this in April during Twitter Files Brazil.

> Musk said you can use Starlink to circumvent the block if X gets blocked in Brazil

Source? That's super material (if true).

Unfortunately he deleted the tweet and I can't find it anywhere, but it was mentioned during the whole "Twitter Files Brazil" saga where Musk explicitly said "Starlink userd won't be affected if X gets blocked".

Ok so undocumented hearsay?

Musk is well known to tweet inflammatory, controversial, or fake stuff and delete the tweet after few days.

I personally observe some of his viral tweet to be deleted later multiple times.

At some point I had a burst of motivation to start writing a bot to keep track of all the stuff he deleted for people like you to observe, but was quickly disgusted to waste any time to be on top of the argument with some stranger.

So yeah, without google or other search engine's ability to index the whole twitter, everything is written there is hearsay I guess.

Yes it is unreasonable. It's only reasonable from an authoritarian perspective.

My perspective is not authoritarian, so no.

The judge doing this may be, or may not be, as authoritianism is neither necessary nor sufficient as a cause nor this result as a consequence.

This isn't the perspective of Brazilian jurists.

https://www.estadao.com.br/politica/bloqueio-de-contas-da-st...

it is much more unreasonable to leave the country to try evade the rule of the law

Just so we are clear, you're saying that Twitter/X should continue to operate in the country so it'll be subject to their law instead of choosing up shop and avoiding dealing with what they think are unreasonable demands?

If Twitter doesn't want to follow the laws of Brazil, then they need to stop providing access to Brazil.

Merely having no office in some country not sufficient, for the same reason it wasn't sufficient for preventing New Zealand based Kim Dotcom to be prosecuted (and his Hong Kong-based Mega Upload domain to be seized) by the USA.

Or how X sued Media Matters in Texas before X moved there and despite Media Matters not being based there: https://www.threads.net/@sherrilynifill/post/Cz5Im7VONzd

Or all the defamation suits against US citizens filed in the UK on the grounds that being published on the internet counted as if it was published in the UK, forcing the US (Federal and State) to pass laws preventing payment of penalties in such cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism

Edit:

Just found an interesting claim, thought I cannot verify it myself:

"Notably, Brazilian law necessitates all internet businesses to have a legal representative in the country who is authorised to receive judicial orders and respond legally." - https://www.opindia.com/2024/08/moraes-is-the-dictator-of-br...

and

"Under Brazilian law, social networks must have a representative to receive and consider government takedown notices about political misinformation. X has no such person after closing down its Brazil office. Moraes gave the X platform 24 hours to name a new legal representative or face a nationwide suspension." - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/x-brazil-suspension...

do you really think Elon has the right to decide what’s reasonable or not? that's too much, no?

These judges are known for punishing family members of the people they go after. I've recently seen news of their censorship of social media accounts of a politician for "fake news" or some other nonsense, and they censored the accounts of his wife as well. Faceless corporations probably mean nothing to people like these. They want Musk, they see Musk's name on Starlink, they go after Starlink.

Starlink does comply with local laws in BR and wants to do business there.

Plus this has repercussions for people in other countries that want to restrict freedom of speech and strong arm social media, and is watched by governments.

Plus this is just tech news, you can post 'why do we care' to pretty much any other story on the front page.

> freedom of speech and strong arm social media

I also see a billionaire strong arming a sovereign nation to push their propaganda machine down their throat.

A billionaire against a violent trillionaire state. What is mightier the pen or the sword?

An unelected foreign billionaire against a democratically elected state? State all the way.

Supreme court members weren't democratically elected. The aristocratic families that own the Brazilian political system and pull the strings behind the curtains weren't democratically elected. Even Maduro, self-appointed "democratically elected" president of Venezuela, from time to time make fun of Brazilian electoral system. Unelected foreign billionaire as a bonus doesn't force me to pay taxes or force me to use X.

> Unelected foreign billionaire as a bonus doesn't force me to pay taxes or force me to use X.

I see this sentiment almost everywhere in the world: people rightfully afraid of their own governments and willfully grant influence over their country to the foreign and often enemy state.

This is a systems problem with positive feedback loop, which means that whoever wins will have all the influence and control over the population over time.

And a lot of people see no problem with the fact that it can be the geopolitical enemy until it is too late.

I don’t know the situation in Brazil, but I see this happening over and over in my part of the world.

You're assuming that the interests of the state are aligned with the interests of the people which is a false premise. The state is a parasitic organism and those in power will always seek their own interests and those of their allies. What liberal democracy achieved is to somewhat bind the interests of the rulers to those of the majority of the population. But this is history as soon as the state starts to control the Internet because today technology enables effective and cheap mass surveillance and censorship like done on China. In the current path all democracies will slowly evolve to illiberal democracies which are effectively authoritarian in all but name.

In Brazil the ruling party (and also the "opposition") are enamored with the Chinese model and as such Musk influence is much preferable and is a balance force in the current political system. If X is blocked in Brazil it will join the select roll of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan.

You're assuming a politically active billionaire's interest of a hegemonic country with platforms staffed by "ex" security/intelligence of said country are are aligned with interests of countries they deem adversarial. Like it or not that's why everyone is enamored with the PRC model, because it's simply treasonous to allow the captured interest of a foreign billionair ("seek their own interests and those of their allies" aka Musk and US gov) to dictate your domestic information sphere when interests are not aligned, and going by historic US foreign policy in your region, default hostile.

Non sequitur. My loyalty is first and foremost towards God, myself, my family, my friends and extended family, my community, my ideals. It makes zero sense to speak of loyalty towards the state when the state interests are not only not aligned but sometimes diametrically opposed to the interests of its citizens. As a matter of fact nobody cares for the state interests except fools and those that benefit from it like state employees. Frequently not even the ruling party cares because their own interests are foremost and first and unlike a monarch they have a much lower time preference.

You talk of Musk but he is a drop in the ocean of foreigners influencing the domestic information sphere. Let's ban Instagram, Youtube and all other foreign platforms, let's ban the Internet and have a country-wide intranet, let's ban all foreign NGOs and think tanks, let's ban Soros (talking about politically active billionaires), let's ban foreign news agencies and journalists, bye bye CNN, DW, BBC, etc. I suspect the only reason you're isolating Musk is because of the ongoing US cultural war and you being team blue.

> Let's ban Instagram, Youtube and all other foreign platforms, let's ban the Internet and have a country-wide intranet, let's ban all foreign NGOs and think tanks, let's ban Soros (talking about politically active billionaires), let's ban foreign news agencies and journalists, bye bye CNN, DW, BBC, etc.

Of course we should have laws for all of them to follow.

Isn’t that obvious? No-one gives CNN a free pass to broadcast whatever they want on the sovereign territory of any state.

The same applies to other entities from your list: there should be no difference between Soros, Musk, Zuckerberg or some NGO in terms of following state rules.

> You're assuming that the interests of the state are aligned with the interests of the people

No, I don’t assume that. I am very well aware that the reality is much more complex.

Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are using Twitter very effectively to divide people in targeted countries. From what I see, Musk is using free speech to effectively help these states achieve their goals. And personally, I don't know yet why he is doing that.

Twitter is no longer an answer to fighting authoritarianism. It was in the previous decade, but that time is gone now.

No more positive change is driven by the Twitter and similar platforms, it is more of divisive and destructive propaganda machine.

And speech inciting violence is not protected speech under any interpretation of free speech.

Even Elon’s weird definition where you can say anything but you can’t criticize anything he’s ever said, thought, or done.

Because the users suffer from this. What Brazil should do is arrest Musk and anyone complicit with the alleged crimes.

Banning products and services is punishment to the users too. Would you ban Paracetamol if the CEO did something bad?

Yes, send the elite Brazilians to fly black helicopters and get the job done Rambo style.

Or pressure US to make their businessmen not committing crimes in Brazil.

It’s illegal to dishonor a judge in Brazil, that’s why they are going after so many of their journalists, because any criticism can be judged dishonorable by the judge.

So? If that's how Brazilians roll, its their business.

That’s how their elite roll.

If the general public learns how things could be better with less corruption, then the world is slightly better off.

And that's an opinion which might or might not be true. There's also this trend in America of some elites posing as "People's elite", and in this particular case someone from America's elite who has an open agenda on forcing certain believes over people is trying to force something on Brazilian political elite. I wouldn't call it a fight between good and evil, I will call it "I wish we could have the fight in the Colosseum in Rome".

Less corruption is better is certainly an opinion.

"Less corruption is better" is much less of an opinion than how you get less corruption.

They are complying with local laws. For more absurd that it may seem, they are receiving requests from the Supreme Court to do illegal stuff.

It's the Justice who interprets the law. 800 million people are in prison right now in Brazil. They can say all their arrest are illegal. That doesn't mean anything.

Of all the ridiculous dictator bootlicker replies in this thread, this one takes the prize. Brazil's population is ~215 million.

Let me call a judge to report your misinformation.

This is called a typo :)

I meant hundreds, obviously. Typo is still not ilegal :(

We care because it's just sad to see a country like Brazil that once had so much potential devolve back into a banana republic. Multiple political factions there are so focused on beating each other that they have lost sight what's best for the country as a whole. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Elon Musk or content moderation policies on X, losing access to Starlink can only be a negative for Brazil's economic development. In the real world, countries that lack superpower status can't afford to stand on principle in international disputes. They have to be pragmatic. It doesn't even really matter which side is morally or legally in the right in this particular pissing match. There's no good alternative to Starlink, Brazil is too poor to build an indigenous alternative, and everyone who needs broadband satellite service is going to suffer.

Brazilians deserve better.

Is there a source for this that isn't the Epoch Times?

(pt-br) https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/moraes-bloqueia-recursos-f...

Here's a source from one of the biggest newspapers in the country: https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/noticia/2024/08/29/moraes-...

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