> “ Rumble is the only company at our scale that holds the line for free speech and American values”
This is Brazil. I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere.
I’m glad they shut it down instead of following the government demands because the company has a set of values, but that’s about it.
I am curious as to how a court in Brazil can require a company that appears to be based in Canada and the USA to block access. If countries are allowed to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, anyone running a website might need to know and obey the laws of nearly 200 countries.
Some of those laws prohibit criticism of their respective governments, sex education, or pornography (including things most people in the US or EU would not consider pornographic).
Yep, I miss the days where websites said "you want to keep your citizens from accessing our site, get fucked, do it yourself, build a great firewall because we don't have to enforce your laws for you" but those days are long gone since Facebook and Google created a precedent of doing it to keep foreign markets. It's unfortunate but this is the new status quo.
The problem is that these sites are supported by advertising and if you can’t collect ad revenue in a country, you might as well not even let them access the site.
I've begun contemplating if these companies are complicit in whatever crimes against humanity these countries may be partaking in, wanting censored-suppressed - in the name of profit, party to industrial complexes working with authoritarian governments, being fascism.
They are absolutely 100% complicit, and not just by chance, they are knowingly complicit. They take contracts from governments to censor and oppress their people. Just like IBM helped catalogue Jews in Germany and Standard Oil fueled the Nazi war machine, these companies take money to control information flows within dictatorships, hide atrocities and even provide information technology to help then further their aims in more concrete ways like biometric tracking and hacking tools.
And, btw, just to make this also explicit: if someone works for one of these companies--and aren't doing it in some way by force, or aren't working from the inside to actively sabotage the company's goals--they are also complicit.
I’ve never been to gab so I can’t say exactly what their content is but I do have a memory longer than a goldfish and I can firmly say that you are not being truthful.
Gab was kicked off those platforms for not touting the “party” line on the covid shot, trans stuff, and other social hot button issues.
> If countries are allowed to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, anyone running a website might need to know and obey the laws of nearly 200 countries.
Yes, that's how it works. Specifically, the common argument that applies to most companies (incl. Rumble), is that you're trading within that country if anyone from that country is either paying for your product/service, or making money from your product/service; and therefore you essentially need to function as (if not actually legally have) a per-country corporate subsidiary amenable to the laws of that country, if you want to continue doing that.
And sometimes it's even worse; for at least the US and Canada, companies trading with people living in these countries have to know and follow the laws of the state or province their customers live in, when serving those customers.
These are mostly simple things like tax codes, yes; but sometimes it's things that are far more arcane — for example, Quebec prohibits promotional first-period pricing that automatically transitions into regular pricing (they consider this a predatory practice.) Companies that advertise promitions in Canada often have fine print that says "offer not valid in Quebec" because of this.
This tangled mess of required region-specific logic is, by and large, the moat of e-commerce platforms and payment processors. It's why even large e-commerce services like Steam, that build all this logic internally for most countries, will still integrate with payment processors like Stripe or PayPal — those services are made options to cover the long-tail of countries they don't want to learn and maintain regional rules for.
It's also why many companies don't bother to actually sell into every market; and instead allow companies that specialize in "partnering with foreign companies to sell their products into our own domestic market that we understand well" — a.k.a. importers — to do that for them (and skim off some of their margin in the process.)
> Yes, that's how it works. Specifically, the common argument that applies to most companies (incl. Rumble), is that you're trading within that country if anyone from that country is either paying for your product/service, or making money from your product/service; and therefore you essentially need to function as (if not actually legally have) a per-country corporate subsidiary amenable to the laws of that country, if you want to continue doing that.
I think an equally valid (and frankly more reasonable) interpretation is that if anyone from another country is paying for your product/service, then they're trading within _your_ country. If in doing so they contravene laws of _their_ country (e.g., forbidden speech, taxes, etc.) then that's their problem, not yours. This interpretation has the advantage of actually being enforceable, unlike the alternative.
And if a country doesn't like that then they're free to "protect" their citizens by building a Great Firewall, which is _totally and only_ for their people's benefit.
That's the interpretation that would apply if you were trading in e.g. equities. The stock exchange doesn't come to you; you come to it. (And therefore, you need to have a legal presence in the country where the exchange is located, with bank+investment accounts registered there, holding deposits denominated in that country's currency. You can't buy stocks from the NYSE using a European bank account, let alone one holding Euros — you have to first fund an American bank account with USD; then transfer that into a special American [government-]registered investment account; and then use that account to buy the stocks.)
In this scenario, the foreign investor is in a sense creating a legal "proxy person" — a virtual citizen of the country where the exchange exists. The foreign investor is then telling the proxy person to do the trades for them. If the pretend proxy person breaks the law, the real investor gets in trouble... but in ways that are more similar to the ways corporations get in trouble, than the ways citizens of the country get in trouble.
(And some countries don't even allow the creation of these pretend proxy persons; instead requiring you to employ, and hand your money over to, a real proxy person, who will face the domestic legal consequences for executing your trades! This is how e.g. Bahamian shell corporations work; it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines. It's never a good time.)
"The purchaser representing themselves legally in the country they're buying from" is also how the aforementioned import arrangements work. The importer registers an export company in the source country — essentially a proxy-person, though in the shape of a corporation — and the export company is what buys the goods and sends them to the import company.
Most trade isn't like this, though, because most trade isn't between legal peers (like an exchange and an investor — both basically "typed as" corporations for the sake of the trade, even if one is a sole proprietor); but instead is between one large company and a potentially-huge number of individually-legally-naive individual consumers.
It is impractical to ask all the people who want to buy a product, to create a foreign trading presence for themselves in the country of origin of that product, as if they were a professional importer. Governments don't want to maintain — or especially to validate and audit — huge databases of hundreds of millions of foreign individuals trading locally. Banks don't want to have to open and maintain hundreds of millions of tiny, individual, unprofitable(!) foreign-deposit accounts for those individuals to use to operate legally in the country.
So instead, governments and banks choose the far simpler route: making the foreign corporations register themselves in the markets they operate in. There are far fewer corporations to keep on the books for both the governments and the banks; and it's far easier to manage their accounts (because corporations are on average more competent at that kind of thing; because unlike individuals, corporations can afford to pay ~hundreds-of-dollar levies to maintain the systems tracking them and keep the bank-accounts revenue-positive for the banks; and because corporations will coalesce bank transfers, turning billions of little daily transactions to individuals' foreign-deposit accounts, into just a few daily transactions to each corporate foreign-deposit account.)
Ignoring the pragmatics, though, there's also a key distinction even in theory: when a company X from country A, trades with consumers in country B, company X is seeking to pull money out of (or put money into) a credit card or bank account that exists in country B (and which is denominated in the currency of country B), and move that money to/from country A, where it will then get exchanged for the currency of country A and drop into the company's country-A bank account.
The manipulation of the country-B bank account, can only legally be done (for most values of country-B) by a company legally registered in country-B to operate on the payment networks of country-B. There has to be a payment server sitting there physically in country-B, connected by dedicated line to the inter-bank network the banks of country-B use; and that payment server has to have signing certs installed to emit messages on the line that will be accepted by the network — signing certs which required a bunch of legal and contractual and trust-handshake hoops to be jumped with the banks of country-B before they'd be issued.
So these are the only options for getting access to such a payment server. Either:
- company X forms a country-B subsidiary XB, that goes through the process of applying for the certs and setting up the payment server; or
- company X pays existing country-B-local payments company Y to use their payments server to do the money-moving-around for them; or
- company X pays multinational payments company Z to provide them a country-agnostic interface for moving money around; when requested by X to perform a country-B transaction, Z will then either signal the servers of their existing country-B-local subsidiary ZB — or will pass the message to their country-B-transaction-partner Y — to do the real money-moving around.
Anything that seemingly doesn't have one of these three fundamental shapes — but which still results in a company in country-A moving around money in a country-B bank account — is just window-dressing on top of underlying infrastructure that does have one of these shapes.
> it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines
Strange - here in Lapu-Lapu, a too-nasty salesperson has convinced me (a foreigner) to enter a contract to buy a not-yet-built condo unit. I just pay a certain amount every month using my bank account, they get the money, and on an agreed-upon date, the unit will be mine. I can go at any time and watch how the construction work proceeds. So far, their proposed date looks like a reasonable expectation of when the unit will be ready.
In other words, it's the same process as in my former home country.
Extremely fine point of distinction that's important here: a condo is treated as real-estate, but it isn't. (Condo ownership is really more of a transferrable, indefinite exclusive use-right.) Real-estate is fundamentally about buying and selling plots of land, and is only coincidentally about what's sitting on those plots. Buying a condo doesn't put you in top-level possession of a plot of land; even if the building is a residential co-op, what you'd get would be equity in a corporation that holds the plot of land. For non co-op buildings, you don't even get that.
For legal and tax purposes, most countries do abstract over the separate low-level concepts of plot-of-land ownership and condo ownership, resulting in a legal ADT called a "lot"; where each "lot" has its own title that can only be transferred through a notarized process; has yearly property taxes levied against it in proportion to its market value; etc. This isn't a natural abstraction, though — just a common legal "interface" used by the government to manage instances of the two separate underlying contractual implementations. Those implementations still each have their own separate laws that apply to them.
Which brings me to the point: foreigners are forbidden from owning plots of land in the Philippines.
That doesn't stop you from owning a condo — because buying a condo doesn't translate to buying any land.
But you can't legally buy a house in the Philippines — since that purchase would come with land. (Or rather, is a purchase of land, where that land happens to at this moment have a house on it.)
Instead, to do something equivalent to buying a house, you'd need
1. a Philippines citizen (a real proxy person) to buy the house for you, and then assign you
3. possession of the "materials that make up all current structures built on the land" (so you can tear the house down, if you like), and
4. the right to build whatever other new structures you like on the land, and use them for whatever purposes you see fit, including subletting.
(I'm actually not sure whether there's any legal instrument the proxy-person can grant you that would allow you to apply to re-zone "your" land. They might have to apply for that in your stead!)
Thanks for writing this up — that's a really interesting perspective on the problem, and definitely worth pondering. I'm not familiar with the underpinnings of cross-country payments so I'll just take your description as valid.
I think it's not completely incompatible with my view, though: if you don't have a country B subsidiary (the assumption underlying this entire discussion!) then the most country B can do is tell the payment processing company you're contracting with to stop doing business with you. That's completely fair and I see it as a kind of "financial firewall" for country B.
Even this power is subject to some checks and balances, though:
1. If your service/site is popular, country B's population may object to no longer being able to do business with you and put pressure on country B's government.
2. You could bypass the financial system with crypto payments. (Yeah, not terribly practical for most use cases, but could become more popular in case of government overreach.)
3. Ad-supported businesses — like the one in the original article, apparently — are immune to this kind of intervention!
Ultimately, a country can only control entities with a physical presence inside its borders, and while some common commercial architectures necessitate this (to some degree) not all do. Countries that make laws that pretend otherwise just end up looking silly.
Yes that is how it works. If you want your website to be available in a country, you need to follow local laws. Otherwise, they can shut you down.
It is different in terms of enforcement for someone running a server in their apartment and a corporation. And it depends on the law broken. If you’re running a piracy server in Haiti, the US government can decide they want to shut you down. But if it’s something minor, the government will just ignore you. Companies are different because they’re easier to target when it comes to enforcement.
Reminder, that this was in response to the Supreme Court of Brazil ordering this platform to remove certain users. They don’t need to build a firewall, this can be dealt with using international treaties and laws. US government often cracks down on websites that break US law without building a firewall. There are other levers to doing it.
Also, they don’t need a firewall, ISPs can block domain names (which the courts can force them to since they operate in the country) very easily and is used across the world.
I would include ordering blocking by local ISPs in "build a firewall". It seems what has happened here is Rumble is doing the blocking. A mechanism existing by which Brazil can force a company with no presence in Brazil to block access to web content strikes me as problematic.
Of course when a company is trying to do business in a country, it needs relationships with local companies, access to banking and payment infrastructure, etc... and governments can certainly prevent those from doing business with it. It doesn't sound like that's the issue here though.
If there is a mechanism by which the government of Brazil can force a company based in the USA or Canada to block visitors to its website, I would like to know the details so I can advocate that the USA withdraw from the relevant treaty. I'd apply the same logic to the USA trying to force foreign websites to shut down or block visitors from the USA.
A court order would have forced all Brazilian ISP's or the international peering operators on Brazilian soil to block it - Rumble simply pre-empted it to make drama around free speech.
I remember when free speech was an ideal that was universally recognized as crucial to a functioning democracy.
"Making drama" by refusing to participate in a censorship program strikes me as admirable.
What a strange world we live in where so many people sneer at the concept of free exchange and the marketplace of ideas, and those that seek to support it.
US concepts are NOT universal - in South Africa we have strong laws against racist hate speech - call somebody a local slur for black person (k word) here you going to get prosecuted and fined and perhaps even jail never mind being dragged on social media.
We call it "crimen injuria" in our laws - right to dignity is defined in our constitution and frankly this has NO place in our society considering our history.
You don't remember when free speech was an ideal for democratic societies?
You must live in a very different world than I do.
"the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom." - John Locke
Certainly never been in the US. The US decides holocaust denial is fine, but saying “I’m going to kill the President” isn’t. Other countries have different views. The US is happy to arrest people who work for companies who disagree with US limits on free speech who happen to visit the US (Skylarov), and even to use its economic might to get other countries to uphold its anti free speech agenda (Kim Dot Com)
Define "wants to do business in the EU". If a US-based and targeted site gets one single visitor from the EU, are they now "doing business" there? Your reply is eactly the sort of vague handwaving about.
Generally, no. It's more about (for example) selling ads to EU companies. The narrative is about EU users but the leverage is via the EU advertisement business.
Can’t they just kindly reply “no” to any foreign governments requests? I’m confused why shutting off all access was the answer when they’re not (to my knowledge) operating in Brazil
To answer: Brazil can't specifically enforce what it asked for. Brazil isn't demanding the entire website to be blocked, it is demanding certain users to be blocked. This can only be done at the website level (nobody is gonna build a "Great Firewall" just for this).
What a court in Brazil can do in case of a "no", is then block the whole website, often done in simple ways (DNS) at local ISPs. It can also put the burden on local representatives of Rumble in Brazil, as it did with Facebook in the past (this means jail time for not complying with a court order).
In theory some people below mentioned that it can also forbid local Brazilian entities from performing commerce with the entity (like eg: fining advertisers paying for ads, or the advertise), but I'm not sure how that would work, since I'm not a lawyer.
Ok, thanks, I too was looking for this answer. What is the logic in voluntarily shutting down? Simply to preempt a ruling that would bar them from operating? Additionally, it would help stop the potential for action against Brazilian individuals and businesses who I guess could use a VPN which would be a gray area currently?
I can only speculate. Trying to get publicity? Wanting to comply with the court order without censoring individual streamers? Just moving away from a problem? No idea.
What generally happens when an international service refuses to comply with a court order in Brazil is a temporary blocking that must be enforced by ISPs. Often it is DNS blocking, trivial to circumvent. Sometimes IP-level blocking, often also easy (via VPNs).
This often works and rarely lasted more than a day. I don't think I was ever personally affected by one of those blockings when I was in the country.
I don't really remember any case where a large server failed to comply and remained blocked.
EDIT: There are things that were blocked and remained blocked forever, but they're often things like piracy, CSAM sites... which are things that often get blocked even in the USA. Sometimes this is a harsher block directly at the host of the website, either via court order when it's a Brazilian host, or because international laws were broken, or because the host simply complied.
Ultimately, the only thing Brazil can do is take action on entities inside of Brazil. So yes, Rumble could just say on and put the ball back in Brazil's court for them to block Rumble or go after Brazilian advertisers.
I don't know, but the end result of that sounds a whole lot similar to what Rumble's doing right now. Therefore, I'd say that for other websites in similar positions, they could just send Brazil's mad demandz to the junk pile.
They're a website. "Not actively blocking IPs" is literally the business they're in. If you think it's a low bar, then why bother to argue about it on the internet? Clearly you think they were doing something impactful, why is that not "business"?
> I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere.
If free speech doesn't work in some particular culture, then it's that culture that needs to be discarded, not free speech.
You'll be surprised to learn that the way free speech exists in the US doesn't really exist in most other countries. In many western countries, hate speech, racism and nazism are prohibited speeches.
To add to this, I’d say as a European that I’m more concerned with the US limiting speech than our own laws. The US is good at excercising its diplomatic, trade and military power to prevent other countries from wielding free speech wrong.
Trading with Iran is one example of that. You can be effectively shut out from the financial system of the world if you decide to ignore US sanctions, even when you don’t have entities, customers, suppliers, or employees in the US. Cuba and Panama’s existence are other examples of when countries ignored the US and paid the price.
I don’t think the US is particularly evil or anything like that, but true free speech is a whole lot easier to safeguard when you’re not relying on the patronage of a superpower. And today, most countries either are a superpower in their own might or rely on one for participation in the global economy and modern world.
…and there’s some cruel irony in suggesting the dismantling of a culture to leave room for free speech. I believe any sort of sustainable freedom of speech will have to grow organically into the culture. And that unfortunately takes time.
Okay that argument makes sense. The culture cannot change overnight when majority of your population is not educated. So what do you propose we do till then? Give free speech to everyone and let it all burn down?
Seeing some your nuts in the US in positions of power - Jewish Space Lasers and QAnon adherents it shows me how unregulated free speech don't work so well.
It might have been the case when the reach was the next town by donkey but in this day and age all it takes is an unhinged person to start a new cult around kids being molested at a Pizza Palour.
It's not even unregulated, libel and defamation are illegal for example. They've just grown up with those speech restrictions and so they don't view them as a threat. This is the essence of conservatism, whatever exists is good and whatever is different is bad. Reasons are then created to justify the predetermined conclusion that the current balance of speech restrictions is perfectly correct.
Paraphrasing XKCD 1357: citing "free speech" is bad, because it's admitting that the best argument you have is "it's not literally illegal to say this".
And when it's literally about Nazis (it seems like it always is) ... Rumble isn't the one looking like they have standards here.
Free speech is the only exception. Bad ideas can be rooted out with good ideas. Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work. It is a pure waste of everything.
It is not. You’re used to countries with strong law and order. Countries where this doesn’t exist, free speech often leads to devastating results.
> Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work.
It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
Edit: Before everyone just points to communist states as what happens when you have censorship, you also need to acknowledge the extreme violence that happens when speech is unrestricted in every case. For example Rohingya genocide was fueled by unrestricted “opinions” on the internet.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Besides, some form of restrictions on speech absolutely exist everywhere in the world. People look at censorship as either complete freedom or Soviet Russia, but in reality middle ground does exist.
>Countries where this doesn’t exist, free speech often leads to devastating results
Never anything as bad as the murder of tens of millions of their own citizens committed in countries with no free speech like Stalin's Russia and Mao's China.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany
If that's your metric for success it's absolutely failed, given the "Alternative for Deutschland" is now polling at over 20%.
As much as I personally dislike the AfD, claiming they're breaking the law by doing Nazi propaganda is going a bit too far.
They definitely straddle the line, but no court has judged them as Nazi yet. There were however other parties, like ANS, NO and FAP (amazing name) that were banned in Germany because of that. Perhaps that's why AfD has wised up.
If you have a government unwilling or unable to even enforce the laws against violence, they will be similarly unwilling or unable to enforce the laws against thoughtcrime, or will enforce them against the victims of the atrocity.
Or you've got a case of someone in country A filing suit over something happening in country A under the laws of country B. Now what is the company supposed to do if the laws in country A and country B conflict? Was following the laws in the country where they're operating (i.e. the country committing the atrocity) the outcome you wanted? What about leaving that country, so that people there have to use a service which is in that country?
"Everybody has free speech" doesn't solve every problem, but censorship doesn't solve any of those problems either, it just creates wicked new problems.
The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech. The argument that censorship creates new problems is true, however there are absolute cases when censorship is needed. In this case, it was the country’s Supreme Court requesting removal of users and it was related to speech causing violence. The same request would have been completely legal in US as well.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech.
No it doesn't. The First Amendment constrains the government from prohibiting most speech. It doesn't require any speech to be prohibited. If the US Congress wanted to be free speech absolutists, they wouldn't have to change the constitution.
> there are absolute cases when censorship is needed.
There are cases where most countries sanction it. That doesn't prove that it's needed.
Can you even name a case where it would be necessary as opposed to being possible to solve through e.g. vigorous enforcement of the laws against violence?
You're also avoiding the question. Sure, sometimes the same thing is illegal in both the US and China, but that's not the common case for free speech questions.
And putting aside the absolutist position, that's not even what you're arguing for here. The government can punish a direct speaker for imminent incitement of violence without imposing a prior restraint or putting intermediary liability on a third party who is merely a common carrier.
It does because I learned this in the law class I took in undergrad. A quick google search would’ve told you that there are limitations to first amendment.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech
It does no such thing. It prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. Congress is not required to make any laws constraining speech, even if it is allowed to, and the First Amendment itself does not prohibit any speech.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech.
It does? Here's the full text of the First Amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Which part of it says that? I don't see it anywhere.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
You can't know that for sure. If Nazi propaganda was not banned and the Nazi never took over again then free speech would work as well. We just don't know if banning speech has made less people pro Nazi.
you're 100% correct. seeing comments like yours downvoted and greyed out makes me very worried for the state of the internet, i can't tell if it's bots or people have really begun to believe that free speech isn't a fundamental pillar of democracy.
The battle against free speech (I am in favour of free speech) has been being furiously waged pretty much since the concept was enshrined in law. The fact that the US 1st amendment still stands and appears to be broadly respected is very much the exception, not the rule.
"When our opponents say: Well, we used to grant you the [...] freedom of opinion - yes, you to us, but that is no reason that we should do the same to you! [...] That you gave it to us - well that is proof of how stupid you are!"
The take above is a classic well-meaning, but ill-informed opinion from an American with a lack of understanding of how the Nazis actually operated and how they could've been stopped.
Let's not act as if free speech doesn't have various definitions and limitations even in the land of the free. You can't get two Americans to agree to the same definition.
When our opponents say: Well, we used to grant you the [...] freedom of opinion - yes, you to us, but that is no reason that we should do the same to you! [...] That you gave it to us - well that is proof of how stupid you are!
Ken White ("Popehat") wrote a recent essay on what it typically means when a company promotes their support for "free speech". He wrote it about Substack, but I think it applies equally well to Rumble.
It's absolutely purely a monetary choice. Rumble isn't any more principled than any other free speech platform, they still moderate plenty of stuff that they find disagreeable.
It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.)
They also ban this:
> You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service.
"Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.
>Clever how censors have convinced people that they are the good guys
It's not that clever; they control all the information and ideas that a significant fraction of the population are exposed to, it'd be surprising if they didn't manage to paint themselves in a positive light.
Unless it's censorship [1] they don't like, in which case they call it book-burning. And we all know who burned books, don't we?
[1] The bar to be called that can be as low or high as needed. Book publishers, online stores, credit cards, and social media platforms banning a person can be just "freedom of association", but not giving government support to a work by placing it in school libraries is censorship. You can take a guess at how many books that Amazon won't sell are on school library shelves. Yet that's not censorship.
> And it's not always a reactionary act. It's sometimes for pragmatic reasons - to prevent or curtail a non-ideological issue.
Literally all of the examples in #Cold_War_era_and_1990s either were explicitly ideological, or seem plausibly likely to have been ideological, and the latter are all along the lines of "Well, they might have had a personal grudge against the author." or "We don't have any idea why they commited arson against a library.". Do you have any specific examples of attempted curtailment of a non-ideological issue? (No, "but our ideology is RIGHT!" doesn't count; denying people that shortcut is more or less the point of free speech.)
Right, for the site proclaiming to be for free speech it doesn't seem that their in favor of practicing transparent speech i.e. Showing the court case or the individuals involved in the takedown:
You can think of the case against this individual as you please, my gripe with the site is that I just cannot trust outlets that brand themselves as an interest group and then withholds information when convenient, since then it's just propaganda.
Oh and doing some further digging they even manages to somehow misread the EU media freedom act so badly that they quote a part of it that clearly states to protect journalists against Spyware, and yet they write that the EU wants to use Spyware against journalists.[1]
And in the same article they paint orban as some freedom fighter of free speech. [1] .
Yep their bias is clearly on display we can Atleast give them that but them not gobong5the details of what the accusations are just comes off as dishonest...
Hard to take seriously. As these free speech absolutist activists usualy are...
Yeah, it's unfortunately something I've seen happen with a lot of single-vote movment/groups, at best they play the useful idiot or have obvious biases that makes them not impartial.
I'm more of a free speech partisan that most people, but I don't understand the claim that it is a natural right in some sense. Is it more or less natural than the impulse of other people to suppress speech? I believe that protecting it is a better policy, but in what sense of the word is it more or less "natural" than suppressing it?
Free speech includes freedom of religion derivative of freedom of thought. If someone can compel you to believe something or say something / or prevent you / they ultimately control what you think and if you don’t have that you don’t have a republic or any true freedoms which is why it’s top of the list
I can go outside and shout whatever I want into the emptiness in front of me and involve nobody involuntarily. Suppressing speech necessarily requires coercion. That's as cut and dry of a natural/unnatural dichotomy as you can get.
I don't think that's a very strong argument since it applies to a lot of laws that are very much considered acceptable. From trespassing to the entire field of intellectual property.
Trespassing is really the only one I struggle with.
It is without a doubt true that land is a natural commons. Yet in order to make the most efficient use of it it has to be managed privately. When I walk across a field, I am not an aggressor, it is the man who erected the fence around it that is the aggressor. Yet without that fence nobody has any incentive to do anything useful with it. I suppose this emerges from the fact that might makes right and anyone with the capability of taking land without consequence will do so. But we are here to determine what is right, not what is simply true. This one is a difficult problem indeed.
As far as intellectual property, I don't think you can own information. Nobody truly does, we create this abstract framework to try to make it so but it is fundamentally impossible to simultaneously own information and make it useful in the world and ultimately everyone knows this. To truly own information you have to keep it to yourself, but keeping it to yourself is mostly useless. A machine necessarily contains the information on its design in it's entirety, to put the machine into the world is to tell the world how to build it.
I'd like to believe that there is a sense in which `voluntary` is more natural than `coercion`, but haven't found one. I'm a political extremist when it comes to preferring voluntary over coercion. But how is that more natural than the opposite?
A lack of coercion doesn't seem to be the pattern of human history or the non-human natural word. Freedom is more of an aspiration for nature than a description of it.
"Natural" here doesn't mean naturally occurring. Rape is naturally occurring. Natural here means that you could do it without any interference from another person or to another person. You're born with the ability and need no abstract systems to support your doing so, you need no unwilling participation, all that's required is for people to leave you be. Anything that derives from just your existence and form as a human being that requires no coercion whatsoever is a natural right.
Coercion is naturally occurring. The aspiration is to understand an objective set of ethics that all people, when only considering power over themselves and not power over others, would agree to. There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.
> There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.
And I probably broadly agree with you about that "should be". But when someone does not agree with us, it becomes just a personal value judgement. If someone makes the opposite value judgement -- for instance that our species is a blight on Gaia, and they prefer to identify with Gaia -- our preference has no more "natural" weight than preferring chocolate to vanilla. I wish it did.
I disagree. I think what it comes down to fundamentally is coercion. You can call anything subjective so long as a person is not involuntarily subjected to the desires of another. Once that occurs, objectively it is no longer a question of subjectivity, because there is an individual with their own subjective experience and opinion being subjected to something else. Someone thinking "our species is a blight on Gaia" is subjective, someone deciding to help solve that problem and kill themselves is their business, someone deciding to solve that problem by killing others is objectively wrong. Chocolate or vanilla involves no unwilling participants, the analogy is flawed. You have an objective right to a preference there, you have no objective right to decide whether I should live or die.
Again, when left to consider only sovereignty over themselves and not over others as a prerequisite, the set of natural rights will be arrived at unanimously, regardless of culture. The only time there are disagreements are when someone wants to seek control over other people, and OK, so you can say "the idea that coercing others is wrong is a value judgment and subjective" but then you have no fundamental reason why slavery is wrong, you only have a mishmash of arbitrary rules and no guiding principle whatsoever. If you agree that owning people is wrong on some fundamental, principled grounds, then you can't come to any other conclusion than coercion is the principle. If you think owning people should be disallowed not because of some fundamental principle, but because of some pragmatic reason like democracy says so or something, then you have to accept that enslaving people is acceptable if the culture or circumstances deem it OK. But you can't have both, it's doublethink. Either we have natural rights are slavery is acceptable if it is fashionable at the time.
It's a natural right because you have exclusive access to your vocal cords. If someone has hooked up your vocal cords to some sort of control device without your consent, then that's a criminal act. What recourse do those who want to suppress speech have other than illegal violence or further speech?
"Natural right" means a right with a sound fundamental philosophical justification behind it, it doesn't mean "natural" in the sense of "something people do naturally". People by nature are often savages; learning to respect the rights of other people, and not just see them as tools for us to impose our own will upon, is part of the challenge of human moral development.
I'm in favor of human moral development through means such as free speech. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meaning, or rather can mean anything to anyone. It can envelop humanity's destruction as easily as its flourishing, depending on where your identity lies.
I'd like to be able to deploy "natural" in defense of free speech, but I've found no substance to it. No premise beyond a personal value judgement, which I happen to share. So I default to appeals to utility.
There's no such thing as a natural right. The rights we have only exist because someone in power has granted them.
You can believe that everyone should have freedom of speech (and I'd agree with you), but one look around the world should show you that it is not a natural right, as clearly it is suppressed heavily in some places. And even in places that claim to guarantee from of speech usually still restrict it in some ways.
Someone stranded on a desert island, thousands of miles from all civilization, can say anything they want without repercussions. Their right to free expression is innate, part of being human.
Having the ability to do something under restricted circumstances doesn't make it a natural right. If something is truly a natural right, then they should be able to exercise that right under any circumstances, in any situation.
It is, but it is not the paramount human right. Other rights, like "life" trump "liberty".
One may argue that certain instances of "hate speech" encourage actions against "life" and that the "liberty" of exerting that speech is trumped by the need to protect that life.
If you extend "life" to mean "health" and "health" to include "mental health", than the right to be a raging racist seems pretty obviously below the right for other people to not be attacked or threatened. QED.
Exactly, then you can broaden the scope of "harm" to be whatever is politically convenient. For example, I could turn your same argument around and use it to suppress any discussion of abortion whatsoever because the life of the embryo has precedence over any speech that would jeopardize it
Not that I personally think that's the right thing, just there's a danger in making core principles this ambiguous
Brazil doesn't have "free speech" in the same way as the US does. Many countries don't, actually.
For example, racism is a punishable offense in Brazil. You literally cannot say "I hate <insert race>". The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against.
Brazil has many issues, but it has an impressively modern / progressive constitution dated from 1988, written after the end of the military regime. Sadly the law isn't always applied and definitely not evenly applied...
Personally, I think "life" and "liberty" are the two most important inalienable rights, but in that order. Liberty cannot go as far as infringing on Life.
And pretty much every other right exist for how they protect "life" and/or "liberty"
> You literally cannot say "I hate <insert race>".
Unless the “race” in question is white. In that case, you can absolutely say that, as has been done by government officials of the current administration.
Legally speaking you can say whatever the Supreme Court’s ad-hoc “interpretations” of the constitution will allow you to say, meaning whatever’s aligned with their political interests.
An advisor to the ministry of social equality has referred pejoratively to fans of a soccer team as “white fanbase” and something like “f’ing europeans”. That was after her boss used public money to travel to watch a soccer game.
A district attorney has ruled [2] that there was no racism in that case because reverse racism doesn’t exist.
Well, they're at least correct that reverse racism doesn't exist. Unfortunately they missed the bit where racism is racism, regardless of who the target is.
> The value of maintaining current discrimination is high enough to motivate laws protecting racists from exposing themselves publicly.
A law that punishes racist speech doesn't protect racist people from exposing themselves. It protects their victims from dealing with that form of hate speech. You're basically arguing that making "hate speech" illegal does more harm than good, but you haven't offered proof or any logical argument why that is. I argue silencing hate speech (or attempting as much) does more good than harm because it limits the impact of such hate speech.
> Or; The value in maintain hatred within society is higher than the value of progressive discourse.
Same as the above.
> My point is that there is a few ways to interpret speech controls
Perhaps, but the ones you've provided don't really stand to scrutiny.
All of human progress has happened through open discussion; i thought this was obvious. We gain immunity to bad ideas by hearing them within public areas where people can argue for and against them honestly. This leads to people gaining/learning good ideas because they more often defeat bad ideas. Leading to a more progressive society. Ban bad ideas in public and people become vulnerable to them in private.
>The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against.
This is not a cogent argument; The vast majority of discrimination is not verbal, in fact the verbal bit isn't generally discrimination at all but a signal that discrimination may be happening.. suppress the signal and you can generally keep the discrimination.
> All of human progress has happened through open discussion; i thought this was obvious. We gain immunity to bad ideas by hearing them within public areas where people can argue for and against them honestly. This leads to people gaining/learning good ideas because they more often defeat bad ideas. Leading to a more progressive society. Ban bad ideas in public and people become vulnerable to them in private.
Brazilian Law doesn't preclude you from having actual intellectual discussions about any topic. There are limits to hate speech, harassment, bullying, etc. There is no real benefit from having bigots spew hatred openly in society. In fact, giving them the opportunity to promote intolerance tends to breed more intolerance. This has been the case with nazis, QAnon, extreme right more generally in the US, Bolsominions in Brazil... We cannot be tolerant of intolerance. Curtailing speech is a "necessary harm" to prevent a bigger harm from occurring, which is the curtailment of life.
> This is not a cogent argument; The vast majority of discrimination is not verbal, in fact the verbal bit isn't generally discrimination at all but a signal that discrimination may be happening.. suppress the signal and you can generally keep the discrimination.
I appreciate the discussion but unfortunately that's not logical. Specifically, I said:
1. All forms of discrimination are harmful and should be minimized or eliminated.
2. Verbal discrimination is a form of discrimination.
3. Therefore, verbal discrimination should be minimized or eliminated.
You're saying
1. The majority of discrimination is non-verbal.
2. Verbal discrimination often signals non-verbal discrimination.
3. If a form of discrimination is less prevalent or is a signal of another form, it is less important to address.
4. Therefore, it's acceptable to allow verbal discrimination.
But that's a fallacy. Specifically "false dichotomy", in that it implies that addressing one issue (verbal discrimination) precludes or is less important than addressing another (non-verbal discrimination). In reality, both can and should be addressed concurrently.
All forms of discrimination, whether prevalent or indicative, contribute to the overall harm caused by discrimination.
Therefore, even if verbal discrimination is less prevalent or a signal of non-verbal discrimination, it should still be minimized or eliminated alongside other forms of discrimination.
You are specifically arguing that we must allow verbal discrimination because we will be able to combat non-verbal discrimination better. I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that this is the case.
Empirically, Brazil is much less racist than the U.S. for a variety of reasons. If freedom of speech was so important to prevent non-verbal discrimination, it would stand to reason that one such example of a "infinitely free speaking" and "tolerant" society would exist. I can't think of any.
Not to mention the fact that "non-verbal discrimination" is specifically harder to legislate against (or even harder to prove in a courtroom), which explains why it is not as clearly outlawed in the Brazilian constitution.
Who determines what is considered a race? Who decides what’s “racist”? Who decides when the “no racism” law is enforced?
The best part about laws against wrongthink is that the things you’re not allowed to think or say are wrong by definition. Who defines what’s wrongthink? Well, asking that question sounds like wrongthink to me.
Another judge decides when you see the judge that will try your case.
> Do I just sit quietly in jail until then?
No, you can have your attorney file an habeas corpus to either have your case tried speedily or have you be released from jail until the court date.
Just because you don't know how the law works doesn't mean others haven't thought about these challenges before and solved them. Ignorance doesn't make your arguments stronger.
People say, "I hate <minority>" in America all the time? I can't count how many times I've heard I hate the gays or I hate the Blacks/Indians/Mexicans or I hate women.
Then a judge gets to decide whether it's enough to infringe the law or not, as is the case in all legal matters (except sometimes that is the role of a jury or arbiter, to be pedantic)
Context is key. IANAL nor a judge, but I think saying "<insert race> is primarily and disproportionately responsible for <insert societal ill>" is a valid statement (i.e. not quote-unquote racist) IF you are saying it in the context of an intellectual discussion, open to providing data to support it, explaining why your comment has a purpose other than just discrimination, etc. etc.
Do you happen to have the (translated) wording of that law? I understand your description is somewhat speculative since YANAL, but it's still troubling, especially the part about "purpose". E.g. could a true, objective statement of fact, based on some undisputed data (such as statistics gathered and published by the government itself), still be criminal if it was uttered for the "wrong" purpose?
Conversely, are unsubstantiated and even false statements (that don't qualify as libel Edit: nor fraud, false advertisement, copyright infringement, and other strictly commercial limits on speech) allowed, so long as they advance the "right" purpose?
I think you're touching on various different issues like fraud, false advertising, racism, etc. so there's no clear answer. You would need to pick a specific case for someone to weigh in on.
It's not a particularly well-written article, but it does lay out the key article from the constitution (article 5) and the various articles in the penal code and the anti-racism law (which is a specific law!) regarding freedom of speech.
Additionally, Article 3, paragraph 4 of the Constitution is key. It's placement at the very top of the constitution, if not legally meaningful, feels politically meaningful to me:
Art. 3 The fundamental objectives of the Federative Republic of Brazil are:
I. to build a free, just and unified society;
II. to guarantee national development;
III. to eradicate poverty and substandard living conditions and to reduce social and regional inequalities;
IV. to promote the well-being of all, without prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other forms of discrimination.
So the proof of the pudding to me as a layman is whether whatever form of speech you used qualifies as "prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other forms of discrimination"
It's so much worse than I thought: Article 287 - Making publicly, praise or justification of criminal act or crime author: Penalty - detention of three to six months or a fine.
So "He was justified in sabotaging logging machines, because sacrificing our rainforests for profit is wrong, and the government hasn't done enough to reduce logging" carries an up to half a year prison term.
Don't ignore the "or a fine". A situation like you described doesn't commonly result in any jail time (or in any fine, tbh)
Besides, I'd wager even if the whole state hated you, you would clearly be protected in that specific scenario by article 5 of the constitution, which trumps the penal code or other ordinary laws:
IX - are free the expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific and communication, regardless of censorship or license;
So either article 5 of the constitution trumps article 287 so completely that 287 is legally dead and it would make no difference if it was erased entirely, or you better hope you get a judge sympathetic to your cause. I.e. stay in the good graces of your superiors.
Article 287 is in the Penal Code, not in the Constitution. The constitution is the top dog in the legal hierarchy. The Penal Code is pretty high up there and trumps thinks like local laws.
Some laws are written in such a way that, eventually, when put to the test and being presented to the Supreme Court, which judges matters of constitutionality, they may indeed be declared void for being unconstitutional. That has never happened for article 287 of the penal code, although it may one day. You'd need an actual case to make that claim, though.
There are no "superiors", except for the constitution.
The law as written doesn't take into account whether the Supreme Court judges are corrupt or politically appointed/influenced. The law spells out what "ought to be", not what "is".
> That has never happened for article 287 of the penal code, although it may one day. You'd need an actual case to make that claim, though.
Ok, so unless article 287 has literally never been used, my fear is valid.
> There are no "superiors", except for the constitution.
I was referring to the defense of "oh but they'd never use this overreaching law badly". If the law is too vague or broad, those interpreting it become your superiors, since they get such wide latitude.
I am currently in Brazil. This is on the front page of the website: "NOTICE TO USERS IN BRAZIL: Because of Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon."
Brazil has been on a slippery slope regarding free speech.
I see parallels with the war on terror, where the 9/11 attacks gave carte-blanche to gain power of the population. Brazil started with the "war on fake news" and now they just ban/censor whatever they think is objectionable.
I hope it's not as sticky as the increase in surveillance from the NSA and the authoritarian approach from the TSA.
It's not just Brazil; the vast majority of governments are trying to put a tighter leash on what people can say online. Because the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know.
> the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know
Racial superiority ideas and/or discrimination is the issue in this case, and 90% of other cases involving censorship in Brazil. How is that something “the rulers don’t want you to know”?
I couldn't make any sense of your comment. You start with argumentative "People keep repeating this trope, and it seems to never be true.". Then you tear down some dumb "pizza shop" strawman. Then you basically agree with gp, while acting as if you are putting up some counterargument.
> Brazil has been on a slippery slope regarding free speech.
Citation needed. Free speech is not an "unlimited right" in Brazil (I'd argue it's not an unlimited right in the U.S. either, but that's not necessary here)
Article 3 of the 1988 Constitution of Brazil states:
Art. 3 The fundamental objectives of the Federative Republic of Brazil are:
I. to build a free, just and unified society;
II. to guarantee national development;
III. to eradicate poverty and substandard living conditions and to reduce social and regional inequalities;
IV. to promote the well-being of all, without prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other forms of discrimination.
---
You can also just read on Wikipedia about this to be better informed... it's literally on the "Freedom of speech in Brazil" article
Human rights are cultural, for example the right to food and housing is seen by some other cultures as a human right. Does that mean the US ruled by tyrants for not recognizing that?
Human rights are not as universal as you might think.
Human rights are human, that's why they're called "human rights." If they were cultural, they would be called "cultural rights." Some people claim that food and housing are "human rights"; those people are factually wrong because food and housing are limited resources that require time and effort to obtain. (In contrast, speaking one's mind is something anyone can just do; it's an intrinsic property of being human.)
The view that only negative rights are human rights is not a given and quite libertarian. For example education is often seen as a human right and is a positive right.
Human rights depend on what one values and that’s different for different groups. It’s crazy to think that the way a certain country/person/ideology think about rights is the only correct way.
Once again, the universality of human rights is implied by their name, "human rights." If the government of Slevobia wants to provide healthcare to all Slevobian citizens, more power to them; but healthcare is then a "right of Slevobian citizens," not a "human right."
Who’s “they” and what exactly are they “banning”? I haven’t seen much outside the political disinformation sphere and some abuses of power around politicians protecting their own image. What aren’t you allowed to say today in brazil?
it's dangerous to equate freedom in freedom of speech as having less restrictions, because then the only speech you will hear is the one from people who can recover from whatever bullsh1t they spit. just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes. in that regard, united states isn't even the most free in terms of speech, it only has the least restrictions. indeed you see cases where the supposed land of freedom severely limits free speech such as dmca (specifically the anti-circumvention law) or charging edward snowden for feloney.
> just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes.
No, freedom of speech is actually unique in that there can be no "reasonable" restrictions on it. This is because determining whether a particular restriction is "reasonable" would require free discussion about that restriction, which is impossible as long as the restriction is in place.
"bad takes" do not rise to a level where censorship is warranted. Humans communicate to learn, they are often wrong and convinced of wrong things. This is necessary to learn what a good take is.
The moral panic of this age is synonymous to mcarthyism and the ages past. It never worked and as demonstrates today backfired to whole generations no longer believing their country or government are to be trusted.
Gleen Greewald, who lives in Brazil, is one the few foreign journalists covering what is happening. Essentially, censorship has become acceptable there as long as it is against Bolsonaro supporters – or, honestly, as long as it is against anyone who doesn't support the current status quo and the Lula/Brazil Supreme Court government.
In fairness, Lula's block has little to do with it. A bit more now that Lula gets to appoint new court Judges, I guess, but -
there have been many pushes from the Supreme Court against the right-most Bolsonaro block because it openly flirted with a military coup. This is the blowback.
In fact, the very first instances of those pushes were during Bolsonaro's presidency; some motivated by government inaction or overreach (the disputes between Federal and State government during the pandemic comes to mind), some by political clash (Bolsonaro's son openly flaunting "closing down" the Court with military intervention; the usage of state cerimonies as rallies, and most importantly the Jan 8th stuff)
As far as I can tell, a political group that threatened the established government structure lost and said structure is now reinforcing itself. If the purpose is to ensure resilience against future attacks or a power grab is anothee discussion, but the primordial movement's reasons are clear
I would prefer a "This user page censored in Brazil on order of the Brazilian government" for the censored users. Then we could see what they're trying to censor, and Brazilians could still read it with a VPN.
Hilarious the dudes getting je banned are accusing the government of being a dictatorhip but their podcasts are based off their defense of an attempted coup by à wanna be dictator...
And people are defending their right to encourage en entice people to fight against the elected government in place...
Free speech absolutists are a joke. And they are mostly Americans. And they often ignore the fact that even in America there are limits on speech.
It's just libertarian non sens. They want to say and encourage the worst shit and not face the consequences... Having a forum and being able to reech hundreds of thoudands of people like these clowns. There are and should be responsabilies and consequences for not meeting those resposibilities.
If these individuals were in the US I would bet dollars to donuts Rumble would have banned them if asked by a US law enforcement or regulatory agency rather than cut off access to the US.
I present to you a more serious recent case, in my opinion. The comedian Leo Lins made jokes about slavery and minorities in a show. As a consequence, his YouTube channel was removed by the justice system [0]. Additionally, approximately $61k of his assets (equivalent to 300k in Brazilian currency) were frozen, and he is prohibited from making more "demeaning" jokes in public. Failure to comply will result in a $2k fine per day.
Regardless of the quality of his jokes, I believe that when comedy faces censorship, it marks the erosion of the last barrier protecting free speech.
Could you elaborate on "He also followed up with attacks on the Superior Electoral Court (TSE)"? What form did these "attacks" take - a machete, or written statements?
> My question is, is this censorship or is this an investigation?
Those are not mutually exclusive. In fact, censoring someone under investigation is the most pernicious censorship of all - it's scary enough to be targeted by the vast resources of the State with intent to imprison you, but then silencing you so you can't tell your side of the story, try to get public support (or legal aid/funding), or alert the public to any injustice or corruption in your prosecution, makes it outright tyrannical.
> publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated
Let me preface everything with a disclaimer that I don't believe the elections were manipulated, and Bolsanaro's attempts to cast doubt on them was nothing but a ploy to keep power. However, they absolutely could have been, and doubting them is, in principle, extremely justifiable. Brazil has fully electronic elections without a paper trail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil), but let's first look at some tangential voting machine news from the US:
In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil’s Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil’s ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015. Wednesday’s decision came three months after a team of computer scientists published a research paper that reported a litany of serious technical flaws in Brazil’s current electronic voting system. The vulnerabilities included the hard-coding of cryptographic keys directly into the software, code libraries that were missing digital signatures verifying that they were authentic, and the ability of people with access to the machines to infect them with malicious code.
So the same court system that recently declared questioning voting machines to be illegal, has before also gutted attempts by legislators to improve security with a paper trail, with the argument it risks ballot secrecy, despite many well-regarded democracies using a paper trail or all-paper voting without issue.
The next day, the state department issued an unusual endorsement of the voting system, saying that “Brazil’s capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and the world.” “The statement by the US was very important, especially for the military,” one top Brazilian official says. “They get equipment from the US and do training there, so having good relations with the US is very important for the Brazilian military . . . The statement was an antidote against military intervention.” [..] The US also provided some practical help to the election process, helping to overcome supply chain difficulties to obtain components, especially semiconductors, needed to manufacture new machines. The former US ambassador to Brazil, Anthony Harrington, was able to leverage connections inside chipmaker Texas Instruments to, he says, “distinguish semiconductor needs and give priority to the impact on democratic elections”.
The US pressured Brazilian institutions behind the scenes not to doubt the elections. It also built some of the voting machine computer chips. As directed by the US, the military found no problems with the vote (I believe their results were honest, but someone would be very justified in calling them biased):
A long-awaited report by Brazil's armed forces on the security of the country's electronic voting system did not mention any specific problems with last month's vote, but said there were vulnerabilities in the code that could potentially be exploited.
Brazil tests their voting machines - on election day, some machines are chosen by lottery, gathered in a single place, where all the political parties, including opposition, non-anonymously cast votes, so the machine totals can be verified. Presumably the machines are airgapped throughout. But it would be possible to backdoor the hardware and add a radio receiver, just sensitive enough that a signal can flip a bit to tell the machine to alter the votes. Of course the software side cannot be trusted at all, as a trusting-trust style attack on developer machines could undetectably subvert it, despite the open-source code itself being secure. It's even possible one could encode the entire vote-altering malware into a backdoored memory chip, avoiding the need to infect developer machines.
Such an attack would be extremely difficult, even for a superpower attacker like the US or China. But it is possible, and doubtless worth the effort to control a country of 200 million like Brazil. Unlike if there was a paper trail, it would scale, and be near-undetectable. Especially if you can install a government or judiciary that is unmotivated to detect it, and even willing to jail anyone suggesting it could have taken place. A perfect example of the necessity of strong free speech protections.
A motivated judge could easily claim this post is spreading false information about the election (I say it is insecure, citing globally well-regarded news sites and making only limited, reasonable speculation, they say it is secure) and defending a crime (the streamer's claims of the same), send me to jail, and demand HN censor it, just like they're trying to censor Rumble.
Sorry, I forgot to emphasize that after that 2018 Ars article was written [1], the security of their machines has improved, I think. The wiki article has more details [2], so one can't say they're neglecting security. Even so, the security is nowhere close to the absurd level needed when faced with an attacker capable of dopant-level hardware backdoors. Anyone who's read reflections on trusting trust [3,4] knows how near-impossible computer security is. And that's with trustworthy hardware!
That paper is from 40 years ago and things have evolved quite a bit since. For example, the entire toolchain that compiles the code running on the voting machines is compiled from source, in a single machine in an air-gapped secure room, and digitally signed.
The attack you hypothesized, where a hidden radio “flips a bit” to alter votes, would necessitate defeating several layers of security and months-long auditing cycles. Software and hardware security aside, randomly selected devices are sent to three major public universities for verification every year. On election day, a significant number of random devices are used in tandem with paper voting, which would also flag altered results. Transparency could definitely be improved by allowing individual verification of votes, but that comes with the risk of voter identification as in the article you linked to earlier.
So not really “in principle, extremely justifiable”.
It’s just such a remote possibility and you’d need some kind of evidence (which he did not have) to point to a potential failure. All that said, some of his tweets literally said “wake up, the elections were a fraud” and not just innocent questioning. He used that to imply that any actions by the justice court were illegitimate. And then he went on to say the country should have a Nazi party… kinda difficult to sympathize with.
> The attack you hypothesized, where a hidden radio “flips a bit” to alter votes [..] Software and hardware security aside, randomly selected devices are sent to three major public universities for verification every year.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - the whole point of using a radio is to selectively compromise only machines used for voting, and leave the verification ones alone.
> but that comes with the risk of voter identification as in the article you linked to earlier.
The court simply asserted that a paper trail risks voter identification, but the many countries that use paper voting without problems of voter identification shows this assertion to be false. But it's easy to determine one side is in the wrong, when you simply accept the other side's assertions at face value.
> The attack you hypothesized, where a hidden radio “flips a bit” to alter votes, would necessitate defeating several layers of security and months-long auditing cycles.
No, you have to defeat only one layer - hardware. Put your malware into some spare non-volatile memory, and only activate it when you get the signal. Otherwise simply report that memory as empty. You can even allow writing to it (assuming you're reporting the total memory available accurately) in case the legitimate code needs more space. In that case, the attack disables itself to avoid discovery. Then all your digital signing and compiling from source (This uses a hand-written-in-assembly bootstrapping compiler, right? Otherwise the trusting-trust attack still works.) is moot.
Finally, all of this depends on trusting the people doing all this verification and development. What is the minimum number of people one would need to compromise, to compromise this entire process? Let me remind you that after all the verification and bootstrapping and code signing and vulnerability patching, to an external observer, a compromised and a trustworthy machine look identical [1]. Given that the courts twice overrode paper trails, why should one trust them?
> And then he went on to say the country should have a Nazi party… kinda difficult to sympathize with.
Oh that's easy then - prosecute him for being difficult to sympathize with, not for questioning the election.
To reiterate - a paper trail would render all these attacks ineffective. And it is proven to preserve anonymity, as evidenced by the many countries using it. Instead, a process is used that requires trust in an appointed (by who?) group of experts, whose work has to be monitored for its entire duration to be trusted, you cannot simply look at the resulting artifact, and even if you do trust the current batch of these experts, they are still vulnerable to outside attackers. The US is on record exerting behind the scenes pressure to claim the election is secure (and also provides hardware for that election), courts have blocked attempts to make it more transparent and verifiable, and questioning it is illegal.
But this is all fine because hey, probably this time it wasn't subverted, and the people that don't like the process are unsympathetic, and conspiracies never happen.
[1] No, dumping memory won't help - unless you decap the memory and read the individual bits with an external tool, the machine can simply lie about the contents of its memory.
> the many countries that use paper voting without problems of voter identification shows this assertion to be false
No, they just accept the risk and haven’t developed a system that can address it (like electronic voting machines).
> To reiterate - a paper trail would render all these attacks ineffective
Paper ballots can be easily modified at the time of counting, there is no feasible way of verifying individual votes at scale or even trying to detect such fraud - this was happening in the north of Brazil decades ago and is actually one of the main reasons the electronic voting was developed!
> you have to defeat only one layer - hardware
And the supply chain. Memory content is also encrypted so you still need to defeat the security chain to be able to modify the results, or the running software. And somehow magically know when this particular device is in a testing room (it’s random assignment for a reason).
It’s funny and sad to be here going through the same arguments as when this started back in 2018. You’ve had six years to read about the system’s security measures and architecture, instead of creating fantasy scenarios that for some reason an army of security researchers failed to consider but you did. I’ve made my point and won’t be responding to this thread any further, happy new year.
> No, they just accept the risk and haven’t developed a system that can address it (like electronic voting machines).
Want to describe this risk? You mark a ballot, throw it in a box with hundreds of other ballots - how do you risk getting identified?
> And somehow magically know when this particular device is in a testing room (it’s random assignment for a reason).
Do I have to explain the purpose of the radio-bitflip a third time?
> Paper ballots can be easily modified at the time of counting, there is no feasible way of verifying individual votes at scale or even trying to detect such fraud - this was happening in the north of Brazil decades ago and is actually one of the main reasons the electronic voting was developed!
If there's no way to even detect such fraud, how do we know it was happening? You've just demonstrated why a paper trail is necessary - to discover fraud. Yes, in corrupt countries like Brazil, voting machines in addition to paper are necessary to combat systemic fraud. But you've put words in my mouth that, when I said "paper trail", I meant "only paper, no computer".
> instead of creating fantasy scenarios that for some reason an army of security researchers failed to consider but you did.
Plenty researchers consider only-electronic voting dangerous, and the EFF calls a paper trail a baseline best practice [1], and Schneier notes "computer security experts are unanimous on what to do (some voting experts disagree, but it is the computer security experts who need to be listened to; the problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application)... DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails... Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny" [2].
Besides, despite your phrasing trying to make this about my ego, I didn't come up with any of the techniques described - others have done that. Nor did I say the security experts in charge of Brazil's election system [3] didn't consider it. They probably did, but figured the risk was low enough, or the politicians in charge made that choice for them. I, and many other experts, disagree - but for some reason only the opinion of the experts in Brazil counts, and that of the experts in countries that didn't introduce, or introduced and abandoned, pure-e-voting, doesn't. Because this way you can make it about my ego, and make it seem like I'm the only one opposed.
Perhaps if you stood on firmer ground, you wouldn't have to invent motives and put words in my mouth to argue.
> Memory content is also encrypted
And the key to this encryption is in memory itself, and an attacker has the source code of the voting software that will run (every political party gets access to it, as well as a few institutions, per wikipedia) and has built the hardware it will run on.
[3] I hope security experts continue to be in charge indefinitely, and they're not replaced by more politically useful people, invisibly subverting elections, because all voters get to see is a black box.
It's absolutely facist to pass a law that breaches fundamental medical ethics (no treatment without consent), and especially to mandate something that will kill some small number of recipients for the "greater good".
Nah. Facism has lots of prominent birthmarks. National populism. The cult of personality around an adored leader. A unifying cause against created enemies. Militarism and paramilitarism. Obsessive, fear-fueled NatSec. Demonization of human rights. Party capture of government enabling revenge based politics for starters.
I never claimed it was fascist, just that it was leading Brazil down a dark path. The reason I believe this is because the pandemic is long over... there is no need for a mandate anymore. It's excessively heavy-handed government forcing an ideology onto everyone in that country.
This is Brazil. I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere.
I’m glad they shut it down instead of following the government demands because the company has a set of values, but that’s about it.