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)
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.
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.
The president party is socialist and got much more than 5%. Deals with cuba, bringing doctors (which is almost slavery since they receive only 7% of the price, everything else goes to Cuba), teachers, the marxist brainwashing that teachers are doing on schools and colleges, "Foro de Sao Paulo", which is a reunion of the current party of the president, presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia and the colombian Farc, the list goes on and on.
A comment that clearly doesn't understand our political system.
Party fragmentation is a non-issue, as they'll get combined. We are suffering a communist takeover - in everything but name - from some of the biggest parties around (including parties that used to have "liberal" on their name just shortly ago). Those parties that call themselves communist are quite divided, some supporting and some opposing the takeover.
> Party fragmentation is a non-issue, as they'll get combined.
That's an amusing claim given that most of these parties don't even get enough votes to get seats.
> We are suffering a communist takeover - in everything but name - from some of the biggest parties around
Pray tell which of your "biggest parties around" is it that you believe are socialist in anything but name?
I find this idea of a communist takeover bizarre: You've gone from a country with armed marxist guerrilla movements fighting a right wing military dictatorship, to a country where the president is an ex-marxist guerrilla.... Yet she represents a party that is no longer any further left than moderate social democrats, and hear policies places her pretty much as a centrist by European standards (and we don't have many actual socialists any more either) - heck, some of what she's done (her inflexibility in dealing with strikes, for example) would've made Maggie Thatcher proud.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
We know the US isn't the only country engaged in widespread spying. I'd be surprised if Brazil isn't doing it. We're all probably better off assuming that any country that can spy, is doing it. Of course, people can call me paranoid for saying this, but I suspect the tide is turning in favour of such paranoia.
for your average upper class Brazilian, having Brazil spy on you is less detrimental than having the US spy on you.
For instance, the US can, unilaterally, SEVERELY curtail your ability to travel. If your name lands on one of the lists the US keeps, it won't matter what airport in the world you are in... those lists will follow you. In Brazil, by way of contrast, that upper middle class Brazilian will actually have some rights that will be respected. He/She has NO rights that an American court needs to respect in the US.
That's an extreme, and somewhat contrived, example. But I think it illustrates how many non Americans are thinking about the implications of the whole "..Non-Americans have no rights.." thing.
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadWe'll just go ahead and let these advertisers spy on you instead.
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.
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 Brazilian government's reaction to all this has been amazingly incompetent even by Brazilian-government standards.
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).
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.
PT might have been socialist some years back, just like many of the European socialist parties used to be (many even used to be communist).
Party fragmentation is a non-issue, as they'll get combined. We are suffering a communist takeover - in everything but name - from some of the biggest parties around (including parties that used to have "liberal" on their name just shortly ago). Those parties that call themselves communist are quite divided, some supporting and some opposing the takeover.
That's an amusing claim given that most of these parties don't even get enough votes to get seats.
> We are suffering a communist takeover - in everything but name - from some of the biggest parties around
Pray tell which of your "biggest parties around" is it that you believe are socialist in anything but name?
I find this idea of a communist takeover bizarre: You've gone from a country with armed marxist guerrilla movements fighting a right wing military dictatorship, to a country where the president is an ex-marxist guerrilla.... Yet she represents a party that is no longer any further left than moderate social democrats, and hear policies places her pretty much as a centrist by European standards (and we don't have many actual socialists any more either) - heck, some of what she's done (her inflexibility in dealing with strikes, for example) would've made Maggie Thatcher proud.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_-KSuhOHs
Probably we'll see millions being spent into something nobody will use.
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.
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.
There are a lot of companies that would "advertise" in the context you describe.
Think Coca-Cola or Pepsi.
Not stating whether or not this is a good idea, but finding advertisers would not be much of a problem with such a system.
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".
http://www.abin.gov.br
for your average upper class Brazilian, having Brazil spy on you is less detrimental than having the US spy on you.
For instance, the US can, unilaterally, SEVERELY curtail your ability to travel. If your name lands on one of the lists the US keeps, it won't matter what airport in the world you are in... those lists will follow you. In Brazil, by way of contrast, that upper middle class Brazilian will actually have some rights that will be respected. He/She has NO rights that an American court needs to respect in the US.
That's an extreme, and somewhat contrived, example. But I think it illustrates how many non Americans are thinking about the implications of the whole "..Non-Americans have no rights.." thing.
Should be built by National Security Agency instead if you're looking for security, right?