WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

I&#x27;m here to defend the judge&#x27;s ruling, a position very unpopular among all my friends here in Brazil.<p>Brazilian law regarding regarding privacy of users of internet services is very recent and clear: if a judge order the company to share a specific user data, the company must comply. You can disagree with the law, but the law is there.<p>Now, the judge ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation (a suspect murderer - edit: drug dealer). But the problem is: Whatsapp have no offices or operations in Brazil. The order was sent to Facebook, who ignore as Whatsapp is another company. So, without any executives in Brazil that could be held responsible for disobeying the law, the judge fine the company. They continue to disobey the order (for months). The judge suspends Whatsapp activity (for 24h a few months ago, but that order was suspended itself after a few hours). Now Whatsapp continue to disobey the judge&#x27;s order until this day. The judge suspend the company again.<p>All arguments I hear against the judge is in the line that Whatsapp is &quot;too big to fail&quot;. That&#x27;s not a valid point in my opinion. If they disobey the law, it must have consequences, no matter how big and important to brazilian society they are. If they had operations and executives in Brazil this would never had happened at the first place. They would have lawyers fighting against the decision to share the user data and this would be solved by the justice system (never coming to have its activity suspended). But Whatsapp simply ignored brazilian justice system as if it was above the law.<p>It is very unfortunate that it came to this point, but it is not like a judge decided yesterday that Whatsapp should sufer for whatever reason. They got a lot of months of warning for this. And he is acting completely according to the law. For me, all of this is Whatsapp fault.

Unlike in N. America, in Brazil a lot of businesses depend on WhatsApp. You can talk with your doctor, call a plumber, claim insurance. On billboards no one puts a website address or an email, just phone number and WhatsUp. That&#x27;s an economy cripling move and it&#x27;s shocking how one judge can do it.

Do we need more proof? The Internet is broken. A few months back there were protests against government in my country (also in South America). That day I witnessed how Twitter images were selectively blocked. (I remember reporting it here on HN). What was really scary is how they could select the pictures&#x2F;videos to block, almost in realtime. Here we have about 5 ISPs serving 95% of the market (counting both mobile and landline) and all hook to a couple of bigger pipes to move ALL Internet traffic in&#x2F;out of the country.<p>Try as I might but can&#x27;t understand why we do not break free from centralized communications, given that we already have both the hardware and software technology to do so.<p>I like an old saying: when banging your head against a stonewall, you will always break the head and never the wall. So, what do we gain from discusing politics? What do we gain with laws written on paper but bent for the best bidder? Let&#x27;s be pragmatic, in particular on a site like HN. We shouldn&#x27;t be talking about the law, whether it is right or wrong, we should be discusing how many nodes do we need on a mesh network to solve communications for a city like Sao Paulo. Is the tech there yet? Can it get there? Who&#x27;s advancing on these subjects? How can we help? (like really help not writting useless letters to congressmen)<p>Don&#x27;t bang your head on the stonewall...

I am so tired of these “takedowns” and other brute-force methods that are used to essentially squash ants. It always seems <i>way, way too easy</i> to do, and the collateral damage is way too high.<p>The Internet needs to start acting like a series of dumb pipes again: so dumb that you have <i>no idea</i> where information really is, and so huge so as to be impractical for anyone to control.<p>Consider highway systems. For roads, the only way to “shut down” somebody’s access without controlling <i>every road, everywhere</i> is to have some idea where your target is. And even then, you probably have to control several access points to really keep that target from moving. And unless they live at the end of a single country road that you control, being draconian about road control is usually going to be very hard and probably impossible. And that is a good thing, because if shutting down highways made any sense then a hell of a lot of people would be inconvenienced on a regular basis (or worse than inconvenienced, if they were in an ambulance or something).<p>Blocking Internet tools is arguably far worse than blocking highways because networks transport an almost incomprehensibly-large amount of information and the effects are vast. By the same token, seizure of a device is arguably far worse than seizure of something like a truck because a device can effectively provide access to someone’s <i>entire life</i> and not just the little bit of information that an authority is seeking.<p>Enough paranoid blocking and seizure, let’s try to focus on world progress.

This is exactly why operating many small Murmur and&#x2F;or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co&#x27;s proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it&#x27;s easy to operate a community Murmur server and it&#x27;s also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements.<p>Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat or centrally provided WebRTC service like appear.in, people downvote me or treat me a like a luddite.<p>But I do understand that given the comfort of a centrally managed WhatsApp, it&#x27;s hard to resist.<p>The only reason there are no fancy mobile clients is that those who would build them are doing it for the silo&#x27;d Vibers, Skypes, and WhatsApps.<p>Comfort seems to trump reliability.

&gt; The Telephone, Used by 300M Americans, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge<p>Try rationalizing this headline. All communication services, whether they are &quot;apps&quot;, &quot;networks&quot;, &quot;utilities&quot;, etc... should fall in some category of protection where such things cannot happen.

2nd time in less than 12 months. probably, we are going to see a surge in telegram downloads&#x2F;usage today.

The solution to this isn&#x27;t a legal one, unfortunately. We can no longer trust the government, of what ever nation, period. In US we have Clinton and Trump as the presumptive nominees, both will be terrible for privacy and liberty. The solution is for WhatsApp (and others) to design a protocol that runs over common ports and encrypts end to end the communication and the protocol. Make it impossible to block without costly deep packet inspections and banning of thousands and thousands random relays, and it will not be blocked.

Would a p2p architecture thwart this kinda blocking?

Nations seem to care alot about &quot;cyberattacks&quot;. Yet a single well-positioned person has the power to disrupt a mass communication service for 72 hours. Without a single keystroke. Impressive.

My sister worked closely with many of the parties involved in the &quot;Marco Civil&quot;, Brazil&#x27;s brilliant Internet Bill of Rights. Two years later, I feel much of her work was in vain. No significant legislation was enacted from it and lately judges are trying to circumvent common sense by brute force. Now over 100M people are unable to use their communication platform of choice for 72h. In the meanwhile, congressmen are busy impeaching the president and calling it an act of god, probably as a device to expiate their own sins. It would make a good argument for a Game of Thrones clone series, some would say. And my sister, she&#x27;s been out of the job since last January. She was let go when local NGOs ran out of money for fighting for an open internet. It seems freedom is the first thing that runs out in a recession. Scarcity is a bitch.

Seems like a hint that we should design our means of communication to resist single points of failure.

For the record, WhatsApp has had end-to-end encryption enabled for Android&lt;&gt;Android since 2014. And 92.4% of smartphones in Brazil use Android: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;245189&#x2F;market-share-of-mobile-operating-systems-for-smartphone-sales-in-brazil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;245189&#x2F;market-share-of-mo...</a><p>So it is very unlikely they have any plaintext data for the users in question. Especially if the investigation happened recently since the roll-out of E2E on all devices.<p>Additionally, it&#x27;s possible WhatsApp did not even store old messages for non-encrypted devices beyond a certain timeframe.

They should shut down access to the whole internet in Brazil, then. It happens to be full of companies, forums, services and data networks which probably don&#x27;t give a rat&#x27;s sit-upon about what the law in Brazil or any other country says but just keep on transmitting messages and bits from user to user.<p>I don&#x27;t think being a messenger should come with obligations to divulge private persons&#x27; conversations or, more generally, bits to anyone. Local laws can force local companies to do so but it has nothing much to do with internet: a letter remailing company (or, the post office, as we used to say in the 1900&#x27;s) could provide similar service.<p>To generalise, all private communications reduce down to talking in private. If you really had to, you could talk to your friend in private and there&#x27;s nothing any government could do to retrieve those conversations back after the fact. Technological means just make the communication more flexible but it should not mean the conversation should become less private just because it happens on the internet instead of the local backwoods.<p>In fact, when governments (across the globe) do that it will only motivate creating solutions which make it impossible for the company to hand over their customer&#x27;s data, with end-to-end and client-side encryption. Yet all governments do see that it&#x27;s their right to make demands because it&#x27;s always the easy thing to do.

This has nothing to do with massive surveillance, dragnets, etc. It&#x27;s a simple and very specific criminal investigation where people have been found to be using WhatsApp to coordinate drug trafficking activities. The judge is just following the law and asking Facebook&#x2F;WhatsApp to cooperate in identifying these people (and is being met with resistance).<p>Tech giants in this area are just facing their own karma for having allowed dragnets schemes to be used in their networks. If they had denounced those activities and continued to only allow targeted surveillance with a court order, we wouldn&#x27;t have this trust crisis that prompts them to throw the baby out with the bathwater.<p>It&#x27;s technically possible for these companies to come up with ways to identify specific people targeted by court orders so criminals can be identified and punished by their respective country&#x27;s laws. They simply won&#x27;t because it will be their word against the vast evidence that they have allowed dragnet activities in the past, which will cause a backslash everywhere.

Brazilian here.<p>I&#x27;ve always used Telegram for privacy purposes.<p>It was amazing to watch the flood of friends &quot;just signing up&quot;.

The title makes it sound much worse than it is -- it&#x27;s actually only a 72-hour shutdown. From the beginning of the article:<p>&gt; A BRAZILIAN STATE JUDGE ordered mobile phone operators to block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat service for 72 hours...

Anyone know how WhatsApp is being blocked?

Good. Now they can all switch to Signal.

I&#x27;m going to guess that this isn&#x27;t only affecting consumers. Governments and businesses gradually (sometimes informally) adopt tools their employees use outside work. Tools that are convenient, consistent and prevalent are especially valuable.<p>If this becomes the &quot;new normal&quot;, I&#x27;d expect to see criminals launching more burglaries and terrorists launching more attacks during the service shut-downs. If you know your target is in a weakened state, you&#x27;re going to take advantage of it.

This is why we need decentralization.

And I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll not grab the opportunity to use a descentralized messaging protocol. It&#x27;s like people want somebody to exploit them.

I hope that someday someone smarter than me figures out how to make a truly free internet that isn&#x27;t bound to be undermined by laws, ISPs, and hosting providers. Of course you would still be free to program censorship into your own walled garden, but the substrate would not be controllable by anyone. I used to think that the Internet was that, but it&#x27;s proven not to be almost daily.

Is telegram also blocked, I think it sounds like a good alternative that people can use now, if it&#x27;s not already blocked.

How exactly are they shutting it down? Are all ISPs ordered to block it?

&quot;Politics is the art by which politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other&quot; -- Oscar

Simple solution (just 4 steps).<p>Instal Orbot (tor proxy), run it, setup Settings-&gt;Select apps-&gt;What&#x27;s up and give the finger to your censors.

I&#x27;m not saying the judge did the wrong thing but I think one could avoid this kind of problems by using decentralized services.

What I find interesting the most is that they have 100M users in Brazil, yet they don&#x27;t have an office there.

Maybe this is a great opportunity for whatsapp competitors? Especially brazilian?

Makes me wonder why people aren&#x27;t making a self-hostable IM system that govt can host and ask it&#x27;s citizens to use. There can be a setting to switch end to end enable&#x2F;disable encryption.<p>I am not being entirely facetious. It&#x27;s after all how Cisco made a lot of money by selling IDS equipment.

just a passing thought, would this happen to have anything to do with privacy and surveillance concerns? seems oddly suspicious this comes after WhatsApp announces end to end encryption

Google, Used by 1B+ Chinese, Blocked Nationwide for Years by GFW.

First its iPhone&#x2F;Apple. Now its WhatsApp&#x2F;Facebook.

Someone needs to create sane international e-commerce laws. I guess the question is &quot;Who?&quot;

and I thought only India had technically laid back judges.

this is my shitty country and his shitty law.

What most people outside of Brazil don&#x27;t realize is that WhatsApp is almost universally used by Brazillians to communicate about EVERYTHING, even your doctor [0][1]. My wife is Brazillian and uses it to communicate with her family in Brazil every day. This will have disastrous consequences for Brazilians domestically and internationally. This policy is being put in place by unelected judges and cartel of monopolistic telcos - all at the expense of the people.<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cityam.com&#x2F;230372&#x2F;digital-health-wearables-and-apps-9-in-10-brazilian-doctors-use-whatsapp-to-talk-to-patients" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cityam.com&#x2F;230372&#x2F;digital-health-wearables-and-ap...</a> [1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wgbh&#x2F;frontline&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-brazilians-use-whatsapp-to-connect-on-zika&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wgbh&#x2F;frontline&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-brazilians-use...</a>

Not unsympathetic to the brasileros affected, but this is not the first time this happened over there - surely at this point the fragility of centralised platforms, and becoming reliant on them, is well known by now?

Skype back in the day went to great lengths to be unblockable (mostly for commercial reason, there was a time before smartphones that people actually payed lots of money for international and domestic calls). It was pre MS.<p>Why are not the other messengers doing the same?

Keep electing terrible politicians Brazil

You are full of crap. The seventh world economy in the terms you are refering to is meaningless. By your logic, is Brazil welthier than Switzerland or Netherlands? NOT even close. GDP is MEANINGLESS if you really want to know how the average citizen lives in a country. The fact is that in Brazil the prices&#x2F;inflation are through the roof, housing and goods are extremly expensive and their salaries are ridicusly low. Let alone the rampant and systemic corruption. So no, maybe Brazil as a whole concept is not poor. But the Brazilians? Yes, most of them are.<p>EDIT: BTW, this is a forum to discuss. If you think I&#x27;m wrong say why, don&#x27;t just downvote. And no, saying &quot;crap&quot; in the internet is not a reason to be wrong.

Again?

I&#x27;m here to defend my rights, put the service back now! Fine WhatsApp or Facebook or whatever, but don&#x27;t block the service nation-wide!

Who gives a fuck about a bloody judge? Judges, politicians, governments are all involved in huge scandals. Let&#x27;s stop respecting them.

I don&#x27;t know about Brazil but these sort of things happen routinely in third world countries like India all the time because some judge could not understand what the new technology is. The decision will be reversed in one or two days.