
Brazil builds its own fiber optic network to avoid the NSA - m_warsh
http://www.sovereignman.com/personal-privacy/brazil-builds-its-own-fiber-optic-network-to-avoid-the-nsa-15551/
======
soneca
I think this is good news. Multiple paths to pass information is a good thing
for the world, independent of the reasons behind it.

But I don't think the economic impact, with American firms losing revenue is
nothing more than political PR blablabla. Market forces (price and quality)
still drives a lot of traffic from Brazil to USA. For example, there is no
hosting solution or email provider in Brazil that comes close to using dozens
of american firms.

Of all the startups here in Brazil I would guess that 80% use servers from
american firms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Softlayer, Digital Ocean and many, many
others). Our local host solutions are used mainly for amateursih website
hosting (of local restaurants and small non-tech companies).

A possible law forbidding national companies to use data centers out of Brazil
is being discussed around here. And the general reaction among national
startups is "if this happens, we are all fu __ __". There is simply no local
solution in quality and price anywhere near those big american ones.

But, again, despite market forces still going to drive a lotof traffic to USA,
I think it is a good idea to have alternatives. For sensitive government and
academic data at first, but maybe creating the environment to better
infrastrucuture companies rising in Brazil or Europe.

~~~
throwawayaway
On the plus side building something like this establishes a capability and
track record, and could be of future benefit for contracts abroad.

In a similar sense a push to getting more than 20% of your local startups on
local hosting - which is already quite a good number - might attract foreign
customers.

Long term the economic impact might be worth talking about but in the
immediate term I agree that it is just noise.

~~~
malvim
Main problem with local hosting solutions is pricing, I think.

I can get a DO VPS machine with a reasonable performance for US$ 5/mo, while
most known Brazilian providers would set me back about US$ 20/mo for a similar
machine. If latency is not a big issue for you, it just doesn't make sense to
host it here, unfortunately.

~~~
throwawayaway
With AWS having brazillian hosting and established firms already there
operating at a high price, it does seem like the skillset is in place for
someone in brazil to do something entrepreneurial.

~~~
marcosdumay
What exactly do you mean?

Are you talking about undercutting Amazon's price? The prices are that hight
because of taxes, nobody can undercut them on Brazil.

~~~
throwawayaway
No I am talking about undercutting the other local Brazillian businesses.

------
us0r
I appreciate the effort but 1) If the NSA really wants the data they will pull
the cable up and put a tap on it like they are doing now. 2) Even if not
"buying American" on the hardware, they will at some point end up on an
American network[0] and the NSA will get the data anyways.

What we really need is another Snowden to grab recorded private phone calls of
Congress. I'd imagine we would see their funding dry up rather quickly (then
again they didn't seem to mind the CIA's adventures).

[0] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network)

~~~
Blahah
As an undergrad I had a job working as a ecologist for the Highways Agency in
the UK. My job was to perform endangered species surveys and supervise
roadworks sites to make sure they didn't cause (too much) ecological damage.

One job I worked on was resurfacing 12 miles of road in Somerset. At one stage
I was supervising a crew as they dug out a trench beside the road overnight.
After a couple of hours, a blacked-out 4x4 rolled up to the site and out get
three guys in suits demanding to see the site manager.

It turned out the JCB bucket had damaged the tunnel housing a major national
fibre-optic link and they had detected the damage. We uncovered the damaged
concrete housing and they had a crew come out to repair it.

Moral of the story: at least in the UK, the integrity of cable networks is
remotely monitored. I wouldn't assume the NSA can easily tap into a major
fibre-optic cable without being detected.

~~~
junto
Interesting story. Maybe those guys in the dark glasses and suits weren't the
cable provider, but the NSA! The fibre provider hadn't noticed.

~~~
Blahah
Hah, I didn't consider that! I expect that GCHQ happily share the data with
the NSA so they don't need to get it from direct taps. So I think it's more
likely they were who they claimed to be.

------
SEJeff
This is great, but misses one important fact. Knowing the level of corruption
in the Brazilian government, this assumes no one who works on the optics can
be bribed by the NSA. I suspect that is improbable.

Short of doing like the DOD does for their classified dark fiber, where they
put each strand in a metal pipe, which is pressurized with gas and monitor the
pressure in the pipes. When the pressure changes (due to a break in the pipe
or someone trying to tap into it), heavily armed security will be dispatched
to said location with a quickness.

~~~
patrickk
>This is great, but misses one important fact. Knowing the level of corruption
in the Brazilian government, this assumes no one who works on the optics can
be bribed by the NSA. I suspect that is improbable.

It likely doesn't matter in any case. Read up on the USS Jimmy Carter. It's
likely that this submarine has the ability to directly tap into undersea
cables.

~~~
rbsn
Can you not have end to end encryption of the frames that go over the wire? I
guess it's immensely expensive when you're transmitting at 100Gb/s.

~~~
SEJeff
I'm sure you can, and cost isn't really an issue for the various three letter
US agencies. They still treat tapping into said encrypted comms lines as a
hostile act.

------
Havoc
Surely its cheaper to drop a stack of servers at the start point and end
point, treat everything in between as hostile and encrypt the hell out of it
for transit over the open internet?

~~~
eksith
In an ideal world, any traffic entering and leaving a private network would be
encrypted, but the issue is with near-realtime services like VoIP and remote
presence where latency isn't acceptable. When you add the large number of
users that use these networks, the amount of hardware for both redundancy and
performance load balancing becomes a problem.

~~~
Havoc
I don't see how this is a problem? You just saved a ton of money by not
building a cable.

The WACS cable (a fairly minor project) cost well over half a billion USD. I'm
pretty sure that with half a billion I can do quite a bit of realtime
encryption....

------
personlurking
Google is also building a fiber optic cable from Brazil to the US, so not sure
how that changes things.

[http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-build-brazil-us-fiber-
optic-c...](http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-build-brazil-us-fiber-optic-
cable-7000034562/)

------
ahomescu1
Article says they're not using any American firms for the infrastructure. This
just makes me wonder what companies are they using (Chinese maybe???), and
why/how do they trust those people not to spy on them.

~~~
gtirloni
They can't seriously trust them (or anyone, for that matter). It's just PR, as
usual. Some friends of the government are likely expanding their wallets.

~~~
drivingmenuts
They don't have to trust them entirely. They just have to trust them more than
they trust us.

Honestly, I'm not sure I blame them. At this point, I'm not even sure I trust
us to do the right thing and I live here.

------
dang
This is a political editorial, and those are off-topic for HN. If anyone can
suggest a more substantive article on the same topic, we can change the url.

Edit: I originally wrote "masquerading as news", but someone emailed to
complain that such language suggested deception where there wasn't any. I
didn't mean it that way, and have tried to make the point more clearly.

------
bhouston
The NSA can tap communication cables in the deep sea. Tapping cables in Brazil
on land shouldn't be much of an issue. Also the alternative to US telecom
equipment is Chinese, and well, I wouldn't trust that either.

------
abaco
And this is the reason why Google is that worried about 'european privacy'.
Being less reliant on american companies is not that bad for the rest of the
world.

------
fiatjaf
Brazilian government probably has its own NSA, as it is a perfectly socialist
government.

~~~
exo762
NSA is part of military, not a part of police force. Socialism or capitalism -
this is irrelevant. As long as country has aggressive foreign "interests",
organization such as NSA is a nice tool to have.

~~~
adventured
It's relevant because a Capitalist nation properly has a very small, very
limited government. Under Capitalism, taxes - to the extent they exist at all
- are supposed to be extremely limited. See: US in 1910.

You can't fund the military industrial complex with anything other than a
modern welfare state, backed by something like the Fed. It would be impossible
under Capitalism. That switch-over happened with WW2 in the US, with the
massive enlargement under FDR of the federal government.

~~~
gtirloni
So the US is what? Communist? Capitalism, socialism, communist... none of that
matters when national interests (of the elite) are at play.

~~~
adventured
The US is a very large, highly regulated, highly taxed welfare state, in which
the total government system spends roughly 40% of the economy (that's about as
far from the structure of spending that a Capitalist government would have as
you can get). It hasn't been a Capitalist nation in a very long time. 30 or 40
years ago, it might have been a mixed economy. Regulations and the breadth of
taxes have grown substantially since the early 1970s.

~~~
exo762
“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from
their slaves.” :)

------
JSeymourATL
From Brazil’s rejection of American IT products alone, it is estimated that
American firms will lose out on over $35 billion in revenue over the next two
years. Yet, they still listen to Justin Beiber.

~~~
spiritplumber
I fully support the creation of redundant fiber optic links for the purpose of
routing around listening to Justin Bieber.

