SpaceX Pulls Employees from Brazil, Discourages Travel There
wsj.com
wsj.com
A somewhat simplified timeline of events (in mt understanding of the events) is:
The judge ordered the temporary ban of a few accounts during the investigation of the riots in the National Congress after the last election.
The accounts were banned, but Musk ordered them to be unbanned.
A fine was then stipulated for each day the accounts remained active.
The fines kept accumulating, and Musk stated that X would neither pay the fees nor ban the accounts.
The judge called the legal representative to give explanations.
The order was again ignored.
The judge threatened the legal representative with arrest.
X closed all offices and dismissed all personnel in Brazil.
The judge warned that having a legal representative in the country is a legal requirement and gave a few days for a new one to be appointed.
No representative was appointed, and X was banned in the country.
The judge argued that X and SpaceX are under the same monetary umbrella and blocked the accounts of SpaceX in Brazil to pay the fines.
A supreme court committee voted and said the judge’s orders on blocking X were legal.
There is still debate about whether SpaceX can be held accountable for X’s fines.[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56326389
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...
They were, with an overwhelming amount of evidence of several different wrongdoings.
Just to point, he was tried for 2 different crimes, by 4 different judges each, and found guilty every time.
> In the end all of the major charges against Lula were annulled
By those same political judges the GP is talking about. Based on the trial not following a law that was created 2 years later, with the explicit intent of making trial of politicians harder.
> and the charge that got him sent to jail was a political character assassination job
And that's, to be blunt, absolute bullshit. The charges were never formally decided after the trial was annulled, they are still open, sealed back into secrecy, and pending judgement.
Then you're just guess posting for your ingroup.
Brazil is a sovereign democracy; it's important in any democracy for people to point out governmental abuse and try to eliminate its causes. Just because he can get away with these decisions given his power and influence, it doesn't mean that we should just roll over and be okay with it.
Elon Musk is no saint, but I respect that he's standing up against this monster.
> The judge ordered the temporary ban of a few accounts during the investigation of the riots in the National Congress
Unconstitutional political censorship. Unconstitutional orders must not be obeyed. Every event after this one is essentially the brazilian supreme court finding ways to punish X for disobeying a unconstitutional order.
It also happened under the umbrella of the "fake news" inquisition, which is also unconstitutional and a blatant power grab by the supreme court.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382
There's also the fact that everything is secret. You can literally see this in the published images of the court orders. Even the involved lawyers don't have access to this stuff. Also unconstitutional.
Honestly it's kind of ridiculous to even talk about laws at this point. There are no laws here, only the whims of this judge-god-king.
Is that not the case?
Musk needs to set expectations around Starlink now regarding censorship and unwarranted, broad-scope data requests. If he doesn't, then one of the most important wins of non-terrestrial, NGO-provided internet will be taken away. The war for a fair and free internet rages on, shareholders be damned.
edit: nvm, I didn't realize he already gave in: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24235204/starlink-block-x-...
That's pretty sad.
No less, beaming unstoppable propaganda from space.
I am all for both individuals and organizations resisting governmental attempts to restrict freedom beyond what is absolutely necessary for a relatively safe and functioning society. If suddenly that individual or organization acts in an authoritarian or antisocial manner, I no longer support it.
This is the eternal battle. How much should a government control? How much control should people have over their government? What are the limits of collectivized resistance? Etc, etc. Obviously, Starlink has profit motives, but to say the company isn't built on ideology wouldn't paint the full picture; I absolutely want ISPs fighting for net neutrality and censorship resistance.
See, ultimately, it should be such that if the government allows something, it's because the people have allowed it. So in an ideal society, all anti-government behavior would be antisocial behavior as well. Unfortunately, that's not the reality we face. Collectivized resistance against overreaching governments is crucial in order to secure our free future.
Any business or organization absolutely must work in the confines of a legal system. It's there to protect me and a lawful, ordered society. This whole "censorship is the worst thing ever" view is to me fatally flawed. Human rights are clearly somewhat hierarchical. The right to be protected from genocidal propaganda, for example, sits above absolute freedom of speech, in my books.
Besides, as many people point out, Musk has no issue censoring people himself on his platform. He only takes an issue when it's someone else.
Brazil is not Japan, Germany, or the United States. There is nothing even remotely "lawful" or "ordered" about their legal (or political) system.
> Any business or organization absolutely must work in the confines of a legal system.
Strict adherence to this policy effectively bans any meaningful collectivized resistance to the authoritarian ratchet. It traps large groups of people into adhering to autocratic policy in order to protect their livelihood.
You can see this as international businessmen refusing to call Taiwan a country, or individual workers being unable to enact effective resistance due to corporate policy that only exists a matter of governmental policy; for example, programming backdoors into websites.
> censorship is the worst thing ever
I know you're arguing in good faith, but I want to point out that this is a straw man; I specifically mentioned the importance of balance.
I totally agree that the ability for an organization to blast propaganda into another territory is quite the double-edged sword. I love the idea of sparking revolt among the most locked down authoritarian regimes, but I also don't want authoritarian regimes mind-controlling those around me into making decisions which harm everyone in the long run. What a hard problem to solve.
I think we can agree however that an individual should be able to access whatever information they please, provided it is available somewhere else and does not lead to harm. You can make a case for restricting access to CSAM, snuff, restricted nuclear technology specifications, etc. but it's pretty clear-cut that access to a social media platform is an individual right. It's a net good that Starlink initially attempted to resist this judge, even if there are implied edge cases which need to be considered carefully.
That's not a capability of the service, and implementing it in the first place would require interfering in DNS requests, which in practice doesn't work because of the inability to get a CA to sign the certificates of the spoofed sites.
Don't fear monger when there is no risk of something happening.
Like he does on Turkey and China?
Cool story bro.
piercing the corporate veil is different than in the US, that’s how Starlink got involved.
my mind almost works like this now: Musk said something? the opposite must be true then.
And it's Musk's fault for this hatred.
The judge froze Starlink's bank account because it refused to block X.
And X was targeted because it was refusing to comply with judicial decisions.
He's now complying and blocking X to Starlink customers in Brazil.
I think the actual answer is that if you invest into Musk companies you do it because of Musk. So you will do and okay whatever makes Musk happy because him being there is what makes the stock do the things the stock does (or anticipation of future stock/IPO performance).
I don't know for sure, but if I were to guess I would say a not insignificant part of Tesla's market prices is Musk himself.
My understanding of the case, from reading the original orders from the judge, is not that their assets are comingled, but rather that both are under direct control of Elon Musk (him being the majority owner of both SpaceX and Twitter), and therefore form a single "economic group". AFAIK, there are some situations in which the law allows going for assets of other companies in the same economic group, and that seems to be what happened here: Twitter did not have enough assets to pay the fines, so assets from the rest of the economic group have been frozen to ensure the fines will be paid.
Musk only owns 40% of SpaceX so he's not the majority shareholder.
The judge's order says otherwise (https://noticias-stf-wp-prd.s3.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-co... page 35):
"O grupo econômico de fato liderado por ELON MUSK, com atuação em território nacional, engloba entre outras empresas a X BRASIL INTERNET LTDA, a STARLINK BRAZIL SERVIÇOS DE INTERNET e a STARLINK BRAZIL HOLDING LTDA, diretamente ligadas à SPACE EXPLORATION HOLDINGS, LLC, cujo controle acionário é de ELON MUSK, que detém 50,5% de suas ações, sendo que 78,7% das ações com direito a voto lhe pertencem, conforme demonstrado no comunicado da Federals Comunications Comission, obtido no endereço eletrônico [...]"
Though it's possible that the judge and you are looking at different companies; you might be looking at the USA company, while the judge might be looking at a separate holding company which is the parent of the Brazilian companies.
> Elon Musk's satellite broadband firm, Starlink, on Tuesday said that it is complying with Brazil's top court order to block access to social media platform X in the country, a day after informing the country's regulator it would not obey the order.
The takedown request asked for IP addresses, does anyone know if non-Brazil IP addresses are also fair game? Feels weird that whatever country can just get US/EU person IP addresses as they wish from BlueSky, Threads etc.
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Brazil_2017
The biggest violation is of the freedom of expressions rights, which are in Article 5 Section 9:
> [introduction] Everyone is equal before the law, with no distinction whatsoever, guaranteeing to Brazilians and foreigners residing in the Country the inviolability of the rights to life, liberty, equality, security and property, on the following terms:
> expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free, independent of any censorship or license
Posting on Twitter is a communication activity and it is therefore permitted without any censorship, explicitly.
Look at Section 37:
> there shall be no exceptional courts or tribunals
In this case, the exceptional court is what Moraes implemented in 2022, basically as a secret court of one. He served on the Supreme Court but also as president of the electoral court. The proposal to give him unilateral censorship powers was proposed by him and approved by the electoral court, with the power being granted to him in the other court. It is a very convoluted legal maneuver to basically give himself powers that no executive or legislative authority gave him. Note that no laws are passed to perform this maneuver. And by issuing these orders in secret, as a Supreme Court justice, it makes the path to appeal difficult or impossible.
It was shortly after this move that the New York Times (and many others) called Moraes a threat to democracy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...
Also look at section 54:
> no one shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law
This one is obvious - a single judge issuing censorship orders with gag orders to prevent public visibility or challenge is a serious violation of due process.
Or section 57:
> no one shall be considered guilty until his criminal conviction has become final and non-appealable
The reason I mentioned this section is some are saying that the censorship orders will eventually be reviewed by the full court bench (rather than being issued in secret by one justice), and that the orders are valid until then. But that’s equivalent to considering someone guilty without criminal conviction.
There’s more than just these, if you look through the rest of it carefully. X’s official AlexandreFiles account (https://x.com/AlexandreFiles) is also posting the secret censorship orders they received along with side by side comparisons against Brazilian law.
After other press found the story was true, he was forced to rescind that order. The damage was done.
He also got the cops to raid some businessmen' homes at 6am because they were in a group chat where someone else joked about a coup.
Source: NYTimes article: https://archive.is/plQFT
It would have been strange if they hadn't upheld it.
Check it out:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382
Long story short: one brazilian magazine ran a damning article on one of the supreme court judges, so they created a "fake news" inquisition and "randomly" appointed this Moraes guy as the head of it. First thing he did was censor the magazine as "fake news".
And it only got worse from there. The "fake news" campaign is still ongoing. Supreme court is literally the highest power in this country right now. Our representatives only exist to create the illusion of democracy.