Too see how much our Government understands the problem, the Minister of Communication asked the "Correios" to build the secure email system, "Correios" is the Brazilian equivalent of USPS.
There are dozen more qualified departments to work on this, and the incredible idea is to build an encryption and certification for email text, they never heard of OpenPGP.
It looks like he really thinks because it´s email(electronic mail) gasp the postal services should handle this.
After reading Cuckoo's Egg, I was surprised to find out that the German Bundespost (German USPS) used to control their national networking infrastructure. Brazil's decision is not without precedent.
Based on this translation -- "The executive secretary admitted that the cost of maintaining a service encrypted email is top. But pointed out that, similarly to what today are companies like Google and Facebook, the Post can sell advertising to fund it."
Ads aren't worth much when you don't know who you are showing them to, or the context of where they are being shown. You might as well buy advertising on a billboard that is laying face down.
So after these revelations of government spying, the idea is to trust email to a government? There is a potential user of such a system born every minute, I suppose.
> So after these revelations of a foreign government spying, the idea is to trust email to the national government?
I changed your statement. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to trust the local government over a foreign country's government. Of course, you could see this as a sign as "all governments are rotten".
The Norwegian postal service already has an encrypted email service, DigiPost. The selling point is that companies and the government should be able to send you email securely. Good intentions, but I have not tried it yet since it requires putting Java in your browser, and I don't know anyone who has (https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digipost says they have at least 230.000 users, ~5% of the population).
The BR Gov said the brazillian equivalent of USPS can do the job because they delivered letters for 350 yrs and everybody trust then (maybe it's because only them can do it by law).
Maybe that will work for privacy which we can also work with here, but doesn't solve the anonymity problem.
This reminds me... Anonymous remailers have been around for quite a while. The idea being, you get your mail through a forwarding service that wraps the package to the final destination (or another anonymous forwarder) so the sender doesn't know where the final destination is actually.
I don't know of something similar can be implemented with email because you still need headers to be visible. Unless email too can be wrapped in multiple layers of encryption, headers and all, that each subsequent relay must decrypt before finding the destination.
> I don't know of something similar can be implemented with email because you still need headers to be visible.
Anon.penet.fi - the first well known anonymising e-mail remailer - is 20 years this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer - it's not only possible, it's trivially easy as you can rewrite the headers as you please.
For just anonymity from someone without ability to eavesdrop you don't need much - just strip out the headers from the sender, and replace the sender and recipient addresses.
For protection against eavesdropping you need at a minimum encryption between sender and the relay, and the relay and the recipient (which could be another relay). EDIT: against a dedicated opponent you want more, including end to end encryption as well, of course.
There are lots of e-mail remailer designs around (most substantially more advanced than the Penet remailer)
The last place I would trust my private data is ANY government. They would better spend that money on PGP promotion and public education to get some real privacy.
And which one of your many fragmented communist or socialist parties that combined has ~5% of the votes for your national congress is it that'd supposedly be strong enough to carry out such a takeover?
None of your big parties are anywhere near being communist, despite the history of some of their elements.
EDIT: Not that you should trust your government to run a "safe email service" regardless. See it for what it is: A way of showing how annoyed they are about the NSA revelations.
I believe socialism rather than communism is what you meat there. The state in Brazil has been inflated for the past few years under Partido dos Trabalhadores' government, but communism is stateless.
In a sense communism is very similar to anarchy, except it goes through a socialist stage in which government controls everything to educate and take away the capitalist thinking of the society.
Brazil has been slowly but surely augmenting the State and it's tentacles throughout the society, but the thinking is not that of transitioning later to the stateless communism but that of maintaining and/or increasing the corrupt great capitalists' grip on society.
if the Brazilian government is so concerned w/ civil liberties, maybe they should focus their attention on addressing rampant police brutality & overreach rather than geek-pandering gimmicks like this.
Being spied upon by (wait for it) a spy agency does not change the fact that a government run email service is the last place you want to host your email to keep it away from the government.
[+] [-] nefasti|12 years ago|reply
There are dozen more qualified departments to work on this, and the incredible idea is to build an encryption and certification for email text, they never heard of OpenPGP.
It looks like he really thinks because it´s email(electronic mail) gasp the postal services should handle this.
[+] [-] freehunter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AJ007|12 years ago|reply
Ads aren't worth much when you don't know who you are showing them to, or the context of where they are being shown. You might as well buy advertising on a billboard that is laying face down.
[+] [-] d0100|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zorked|12 years ago|reply
The Brazilian government's reaction to all this has been amazingly incompetent even by Brazilian-government standards.
[+] [-] d0100|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talles|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noarchy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reycharles|12 years ago|reply
I changed your statement. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to trust the local government over a foreign country's government. Of course, you could see this as a sign as "all governments are rotten".
[+] [-] annnnd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] byoogle|12 years ago|reply
We'll just go ahead and let these advertisers spy on you instead.
[+] [-] galaktor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unhammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rslonik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PauloManrique|12 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_-KSuhOHs
[+] [-] eksith|12 years ago|reply
This reminds me... Anonymous remailers have been around for quite a while. The idea being, you get your mail through a forwarding service that wraps the package to the final destination (or another anonymous forwarder) so the sender doesn't know where the final destination is actually.
I don't know of something similar can be implemented with email because you still need headers to be visible. Unless email too can be wrapped in multiple layers of encryption, headers and all, that each subsequent relay must decrypt before finding the destination.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
Anon.penet.fi - the first well known anonymising e-mail remailer - is 20 years this year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer - it's not only possible, it's trivially easy as you can rewrite the headers as you please.
For just anonymity from someone without ability to eavesdrop you don't need much - just strip out the headers from the sender, and replace the sender and recipient addresses.
For protection against eavesdropping you need at a minimum encryption between sender and the relay, and the relay and the recipient (which could be another relay). EDIT: against a dedicated opponent you want more, including end to end encryption as well, of course.
There are lots of e-mail remailer designs around (most substantially more advanced than the Penet remailer)
[+] [-] facorreia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramon|12 years ago|reply
Should be built by National Security Agency instead if you're looking for security, right?
[+] [-] kbart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PauloManrique|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
None of your big parties are anywhere near being communist, despite the history of some of their elements.
EDIT: Not that you should trust your government to run a "safe email service" regardless. See it for what it is: A way of showing how annoyed they are about the NSA revelations.
[+] [-] gabriel34|12 years ago|reply
In a sense communism is very similar to anarchy, except it goes through a socialist stage in which government controls everything to educate and take away the capitalist thinking of the society.
Brazil has been slowly but surely augmenting the State and it's tentacles throughout the society, but the thinking is not that of transitioning later to the stateless communism but that of maintaining and/or increasing the corrupt great capitalists' grip on society.
[+] [-] Lyaserkiev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swah|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudus|12 years ago|reply
Probably we'll see millions being spent into something nobody will use.
[+] [-] chongli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batemanesque|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anxiousest|12 years ago|reply
Brazil is a country that wants sovereignty over its citizens' digital lives, mainly to spy on them: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...
Being spied upon by (wait for it) a spy agency does not change the fact that a government run email service is the last place you want to host your email to keep it away from the government.
It’s something that Iran would do (and did).