Of course, trying to block the Brazilian Internet Surveillance Bill is something we are really focused on doing. But as more people with political skills join us on convincing the Deputies this bill is just plain wrong, the rest of us, geek guys, are investigating Tor deployment.
I’d have to study the bill deeper than I have already, and probably ask some lawyer about it, but I think that the bill effectively makes unlawful to deploy Tor in Brazil as an end router. Via article 22 of the bill, providing an end-point Tor router can be considered “providing access to a worldwide computer network”, thus would require to keep three years of logs, what would render pointless having a Tor router in the first place.
What can “save” an end-point Tor router is the wording of this very article. It states that just commercial or public sector providers are entangled by it. What if I make a free (as in free beer) end-point Tor router available? It is not “public sector”, since it’s not tied to the government… It’s not commercial, since I am not selling access to it. But then, someone can argue that it’s commercial activity with zero-price… Brazilian law is just so confuse…
Anyway… if we can get it straight with the lawyers, I think we’ll watch a proliferation of end-point Tor routers in Brazil. This would assure that, even if this bill passes, it will not be easy for the government to peek on the citizens traffic. Geeks always having to fix what politicians break so easily…
