EU – Brazil: working together towards a gold standard in privacy protection | Hacker News Reader

EU – Brazil: working together towards a gold standard in privacy protection

europa.eu

58 pointsAoyagi19 comments

This kind of initiative is really great. It's refreshing to see the governments of major powers unite in order to enshrine protections for their citizens.

It really paints a stark contrast with the USA-Russia-China totalitarianesque power bloc, though. Our government in the US is currently weaseling out of net neutrality while strongly pushing for omni-surveillance in addition to the usual drumbeat of anti-liberty measures in the name of security. Here, the message is that you have no privacy from the state, and if you want privacy from the corporate branch of the state, you're probably a criminal.

I really wish we could point to this and shame our politicians into following suit.

I guess you haven't heard:

"The Five Eyes are cooperating with various 3rd Party countries in at least two groups: The "Nine Eyes", consisting of the Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway. The "Fourteen Eyes", consisting of the same countries as the Nine Eyes plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden.[41] The actual name of this group is SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR) and its purpose is coordinating the exchange of military signals intelligence among its members.[42]

Germany is reportedly interested in moving closer to the inner circle: an internal GCHQ document from 2009 said that the “Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group." Germany may even wish to join Five Eyes.[43] Referring to Five Eyes, French President François Hollande has said that his country is "not within that framework and we don't intend to join."[44] According to a former top U.S. official, "Germany joining would be a possibility, but not France – France itself spies on the US far too aggressively for that."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes.2C_14_Ey...

Brazil is not a major power.

In which area exactly? Since 2005 it's been featured in the top 10 biggest economies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

http://money.cnn.com/news/economy/world_economies_gdp/

Do you mean it's not a major power in privacy-related matters? It might not be and all the actions from the current president could just be PR stunts but at least the talks are happening in a certain direction (opposite to the US vision).

  > In which area exactly?

This question really gets to the heart of what it means to be a major power. If you have to narrow the examination to focus on somethings and exclude others you are not dealing with a major power. Major powers are major players in military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural spheres (it is important to note that these are big spheres too, like global sized spheres). I have never heard anyone say that Brazil is anything other than a regional power.

If you are interested in learning more about power in international relations here are some wikipedia entries that might be a good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_%28international_relatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_power

Addendum: It seems that you are from Brazil. Please do not take this personally or interpret it as a dismissal of Brazil.

Got it, and it makes perfect sense. Your initial comment was a bit too dry so I wanted to clarify. Thanks for those links, they look very interesting.

Brazil aspires to be a world power but its execution is always sub par. I really like the quote that says "Brazil is the country of the future, and will always be". It is so true.

We're certainly no military (our presence in Haiti is a joke) or economic power (our GDP is increasing mainly due to population size and small improvements in quality of life for really poor people, but industry productivity and innovation are, again, a joke and not taken seriously here). We like to think that in diplomatic issues Brazil has played some kind of middleman role but that's questionable (people won't give you status/credit just because.. and we don't even use the economic weight correctly, often trying to be the good guys) and in cultural sphere.. well, soccer and carnival are not something I'm proud of.

Thanks again for your explanation, it's certainly spot on.

The aspirational bit is spot on and the G4 membership is a great example of the bigger aspirations. When I said I had never heard Brazil mentioned as anything other than a regional power I kind of lied. I have frequently heard that Brazil aspires to be a major power.

I am glad that you did not take any offense to my comments. I actually have always been interested in Brazil, the flag was probably one of the first countries' flags I could recognize as a child after US, Canada and USSR (at the time). My mother went to Brazil with American Foreign Service in the 60s. So ever since I was a little kid I remember getting a Christmas card from her host family and I have always wanted to take them up on the open offer to come visit.

I would say that Brazil is no lesser a power than Russia. Russia just makes more noise. India is in the same league, I guess. The EU is lacking in diplomatic unity and militaristic strength. If we set the threshold above those, we're left with the US and China.

No lesser a power? The only way this possibly makes sense is if we restrict our investigation to economic power. And as I said above when you have to restrict the assessment to one category you are no longer talking about major/great powers. That being said economic power is one component of being a "great/major power" and I have no problem saying Brazil is definitely neck and neck with Russia when it comes to economic indicators. When you consider military and diplomatic might it is no contest.

The nice thing is we have two quick and easy litmus tests for diplomatic and military power: season tickets to the security council and nuclear weapons. Things do not get any better if you dig a little deeper. Russia easily doubles Brazilian military spending and has battle tested forces. Speaking of forces Russia has six times the number of active duty personnel. On the diplomatic front I am at a loss for anything that Brazil has been involved in that comes close to Russia's participation in talks with Iran and North Korea.

This is realpolitik jazz-hands with football thrown in to make light of a topic of grave importance.

Also, of course, any framework set up today to control data tomorrow will tomorrow be turned on its head and used as a legislative basis for expanded intrusive activities.

The funny thing is that soccer is usually used here to distract people from the real issues (corruption, privacy, healthcare, public transportation, education, etc).

I wonder if this "Vice-President of the European Commission" has any idea that her message will be read as "blah blah blah world cup blah blah go team! blah blah blah".

I really hope Brazil loses this tournament, that the abuses in building the stadiums are scrutinized further and a lot of government officials and companies are punished for this ridiculous private event paid with people's tax money. Yes, I'm a dreamer.

So... aside from the hot air, the only concrete thing I got from that press release was that the EU politicians are so pissed that the EU court struck down their draconian data retention laws that they're going to pass a new one that resolves the technicalities on which the old one was struck down.

And apparently, this is somehow going to bring the EU to "a gold standard in privacy protection". What?

> the only concrete thing I got from that press release was that the EU politicians are so pissed that the EU court struck down their draconian data retention laws that they're going to pass a new one that resolves the technicalities on which the old one was struck down.

Where did you read that? Are you confusing the "data protection" with "data retention" terms? They sound similar but are opposite laws/movements.

In the article.

"These are safeguards that were missing in the EU's Data Retention Directive. As a result, the Directive has been invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU, Europe's highest court. The court said: the violation of individuals' rights was of "vast scope and particular gravity". One thing is certain: it will be have to be revised, with greater protection included for individuals."

So, we really need to protect privacy better, but we're still going to preemptively wiretap everyone in case some of them turn out to be criminals.

>On data privacy, like in football, we are playing in the same direction; to score a goal and win the Championship for a gold standard in privacy protection! A combined EU-Brazil team can be a winner.

Did that sound any better in French or German?!

I read it in Spanish but got stuck at "Goooooooaaaaa

Has anything been done to locate and disable existing tapping devices installed by the NSA ? What has been put in place to harden existing infrastructures from intrusion by rogue actors ?

Well... this really is something good. The 'Marco Civil' came in response to law projects ('AI-5-digital' or 'Lei Azeredo') that harm the privacy of Brazilian citizen. But there are negative features in 'Marco Civil' take too long to be fixed. This all because was approved with haste.

I wouldn't mind seeing stronger trade relationship between EU and Brazil/South America, too. Hopefully this is the beginning of a great relationship, both united against abuses of countries like US, Russia or China.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com