Whatsapp Shutdown for 48 Hours

According to news reports a judge in the 1st. Criminal Court of São Bernardo do Campo - SP ordered the 48 hour blocking of WhatsApp because WhatsApp would not provide information that the court wanted. Oi has stated that they are seeking an injunction.

Barring an injunction that would revoke the exiting order service should only be interrupted for 48 hours.

Typical STUPID move by the judicial system here... kind of like catching a car doing 150 Km/h in a 50 Km/h zone on radar and issuing a fine to all of the other motorists, but not to the violator!!!

NOTE: The blockage ONLY effects those who are using WhatsApp over the cellular telephone network. Those using the app over Wi-Fi will continue unaffected. The court order only effects the telephone operators in this country.

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team

It's already unblocked.....another judge ordered it
What a mess only in Brazil!

How one single judge in São Bernardo do Campo, can issue an order that has effect in the whole country, even though the initial order violated the Constitution, is beyond me. But that's Brazil for you!!!

Thank God that cooler heads have prevailed and a judge who actually has a brain in his head struck down the ruling.

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team

My wife uses this service. She told me that the service was shut down because the police wanted access to information of communications by criminals already in JAIL.

They were refused.

A judge issued a court order shutting the service down during the least active hours. Another judge countermanded this order before peak hours, siting communication laws. Efficient no?

This places the whole situation outside of power law or police to act upon. Let me clear. The criminals can continue to use modern communication unimpeded by the police efforts to know what is being communicated.

Without this information the police cannot investigate anything.

And the beat goes on..............................................

Not exactly exnyer, the judge in the original criminal case in São Bernardo dos Campos clearly had the legal authority to order the "quebra de sigilo" of telephone conversations and text messages sent through (national) cellular telephone operators. He exceeded that authority by issuing an extraterritorial order that would require a foreign company (operating only out of the USA, no physical presence in Brazil) to turn over protected information. That order, to have legal effect in the USA would have had to have been registered in a US Federal Court before it could be enforced and it was not done. For that reason WhatsApp, rightfully, refused to comply.

As if that wasn't bad enough the judge then issued an order to block the service in all of Brazil for 48 hours. Again, not only did he not have the legal authority to do so, the order itself violated Art. 5 §II of the Federal Constitution of 1988 which states, "II - ninguém será obrigado a fazer ou deixar de fazer alguma coisa senão em virtude de lei;" (II - noone shall be obligated to do or not do something if not by virtue of law;)

We as users of WhatsApp are not defendants in the original criminal case that gave rise to the order to break the privacy of the defendants, nor are we owners, partners or shareholders in WhatsApp, which is a wholly foreign owned and operated company. The initial order and the blockage order have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with us. Problem is, this is Brazil where the average Brazilian doesn't know the first thing about the Constitution or their individual rights, so even judges routinely issue orders that violate the Constitution, simply because they can get away with it.

While many use their phones to access the internet, they pay for that as a separate service and WhatsApp doesn't even use the same technology as cellular service. WhatsApp is VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). It is exactly for this reason that those who accessed WhatsApp via Wi-fi were not effected, since internet providers were not served with a similar order. The judge figured he could simply get away with serving the few cellular operators in Brazil and nobody would blow wise to he illegality of his action.

While nobody approves of criminal activity, we should not have our rights trampled in order to fight criminality and we should not simply give those rights up willingly. If the same situation had happened in the USA or Canada, the judge would find his ass in a sling, if not cooling his heals in jail. Unfortunately this is Brazil and the Constitution only means something if the government wants it to mean something, the little guy hasn't got a fighting chance.

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team

As always an excellent analysis. Thanks James

Motherboard Newsletter
Cell to Cell: How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil's Prisons
Written by Jonathan Franklin
April 14, 2014 // 09:10 AM EST

On January 18, 2013, prison guards in the Brazilian city of Joinville rounded up a group of inmates and began torturing them. Over the course of four hours, the naked men were shot with rubber bullets and doused with pepper spray. In a video clip, the men are seen in the fetal position, waiting for the attack to end.

The prisoners' counterattack was swift and deadly. Days after the video surfaced, prisoners organized attacks across the six-million-person state of Santa Catarina. The homes of prison officials, police stations, and public busses were all attacked. “Prisoners decided to orchestrate the attacks to call the attention of the population and authorities to issues of management in the prison system,” said Col. Nazareno Marcineiro, the commander of Santa Catarina's military police.

The Santa Catarina uprising was yet another chapter in an eight-year reign of terror organized and carried out by Brazilian prisoners. In Santa Catarina the attacks were organized by Primeiro Comando Catarinense, a copycat offshoot of Brazil's most powerful prison gang, the Primeiro Comando do Capital, which is widely known as “The PCC.”

The attacks have left hundreds dead and provide a jarring example of what can happen when imprisoned criminals have widespread access to communications technology. Whether its members are looking up the home address of their least favorite guard, organizing a riot, or even buying gold bullion with stolen credit card numbers, the PCC has shown that prisoners with bandwidth pose a host of challenges.

The PCC is hardly alone in its exploitation of in-prison cell phone usage to organize crimes, but few prison gangs in the world can match its combination of access to phones, brute violence, and organizational discipline. And as the PCC has shown repeatedly, wired prisoners change the entire concept of incarceration. Instead of being isolated and punished, the inmate with access to a cell can organize murders, threaten witnesses, plan crimes, and browse online porn to figure out which escort to order up for the next intimate visit.

Last year, Brazilian authorities confiscated an estimated 35,000 phones from prisoners, yet Brazilian organized crime leaders continued to have widespread ability to make calls, receive calls, organize conference calls, and even hold virtual trials where gang leaders from different prisons are patched in to a central line to debate the fate of gang members accused of betraying the group's ironclad rules.

“They [prisoners] organize executions over the phone. You never forget it when you hear the crime bosses voting one after another – ‘kill', ‘kill', ‘kill'...I have heard this type of conversation many times,” said Marcelo Cristino, a federal prosecutor in São Paulo, as he described a conference call among an estimated seven PCC leaders.

The PCC was born out of organized crime—by Brazilian prison guards. The initial organization by the group was in response to the massacre of 111 prisoners at Carandiru prison in 1992. That event instigated the prisoners to organize and fight for basic human rights by presenting a unified front to prison authorities.

Thanks to the phone and their union-style rules and regulations, criminals in São Paulo who are sent to prison and removed from society are transported into a regimented, disciplined world organized not by the state—but by the PCC.

Led by Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, aka “Marcola," the PCC is based in Brazil's sprawling economic capital, São Paulo, a city of 20 million. With operations in Bolivia and Paraguay, the PCC control wide swaths of the cocaine and marijuana trade as well as kidnapping, prostitution, and extortion schemes. Though “Marcola” has been in prison since 1999, his access to cell phones has allowed him to not only control but to expand his empire to an estimated 22 states across Brazil.

Using clandestine cell phones and capitalizing on the appalling conditions of Brazilian prisons, the PCC now controls dozens of prisons in the state of São Paulo and has expanded to other prisons throughout much of Brazil. The PCC also control lucrative in-prison drug sales, trafficking of other contraband, control of prison commissary services, and numerous extortion scams that begin with an inmate on a cell phone threatening a civilian on the other side of the wall.

Each member of the PCC must pledge allegiance to a 16-point oath. It bars rape, but leaves the door wide open for lucrative endeavors, including bank robberies and kidnapping. Once sworn in, the members must pay around $25 a month if they are inside prison, and $250 if they are on the other side of the razor wire. Benefits include an armory where criminal can borrow weapons, returning them after the crime. Powering .

Asked by a newspaper reporter if he feared dying, Marcola outlined a new balance of power. “It is you who are afraid of dying, not me. As a matter of fact, here in jail you cannot come in and kill me…but I can order to kill you out there," he said. Referring to his loyalists, Marcola described inmates who “graduate in the jails like monsters” and form “a new culture of killing aided by modern technology, satellites, cellular phones, internet. It is ‘the shit' [inmates] with chips, with megabytes.”

Smuggling phones into Brazilian prisons had become a niche industry. Lawyers and visitors are regularly caught smuggling in the phones, using ruses ranging from phones stuffed in a hollow fake leg to a man who glued the phone to his head then covered it with a hollowed out Afro.

In May 2009, police on the perimeter of Venceslau, a maximum security prison in São Paulo, made another unusual discovery. At a routine police stop, a group of three adults and a teenager were found traveling with a remote control helicopter, 14 cell phones, and 1,000 reais (US$450).

Under interrogation, the teenager confessed that he had been paid 10,000 reais (US$4,500) by prisoners to buy the toy copter, the 14 cell phones, and rent the car. He was promised another 10,000 reais if he could pack the helicopter with the phones and land it inside the prison courtyard. While police declined to identify the intended recipients, the maximum security Venceslau prison is home to many of the PCC leaders.

Corrupt Brazilian prison guards are known to charge between 800-2000 reais to smuggle in cell phones. During raids, guards often confiscate the very same phones, which are then resold back to the prisoners. Brazilian prison guards are also paid to smuggle in phone cards to recharge the illegal handsets already inside the prison.

In the most creative case, in 2009, a guard at Tower II of the Danilo Pinheiro prison noticed a pigeon balanced on a power line just outside the prison courtyard. The pigeon wobbled like it was drunk and had a bag tied to its body. When the pigeon fell to the ground and landed in a neighboring lot, the guards tracked down the errant pigeon and opened the bag. It contained pieces of a phone.

The following day a second pigeon was trapped, this time by prison guards who used bread crumbs to lure the bird close enough to snare it with a fish net. Inside the bag? A cell phone charger.

Six days later a third pigeon was trapped, this one with two phones, a battery charger, and a slip of paper with the name of the inmate who was to receive the phone. "The use of carrier pigeon to smuggle cell phones into prisons is becoming almost commonplace," a prison guard told the Associated Press. "Guards now keep a sharp eye on pigeon as well as on inmates."

Phone cards are now considered currency inside São Paulo prisons. With a cell phone, a prisoner can traffic drugs inside and outside the walls. For hundreds of Brazilian inmates, the phone helps them run a direct marketing appeal that is both simple and brutal. Going through the phone book, the inmates ring São Paulo residents and say, “I am from the PCC. I know where your children go to school. If you do not pay, I will grab them.”

The threat ends with a solution: place $100 on a specific cell phone account now and the child is saved. With an estimated positive response rate of five percent, these direct fear marketers “earn” thousands of minutes on their phones by terrifying city residents into subsidizing their cell phone accounts.

Though prisoners know that much of their phone talk is monitored, they have devised countermeasures. “We had one group of prisoners who took French lessons and then they would speak in French just a few words, very quick and all in code,” said a São Paulo police investigator who asked not to be named. “You see the same thing in the text messages. It is all in code and even if we do break it, by that time the [drug] delivery already happened like three days before.”

Using guerilla strategy and cell phones, the PCC has evolved from a classic pyramid structure to the more difficult to penetrate structure of independent cells, much like a classic terrorist group. Thus a single member can't compromise more than a fraction of the organization.

Ironically, as they spread mayhem on the streets, the PCC is recognized even by its critics for bringing order and lowered levels of violence inside the prisons that it essentially controls.

“There is a kind of deal between the prison directors and the PCC,” Julio Ferreira, a São Paulo based photojournalist, told me. “The deal is the PCC won't make a mess in the jail. Don't give me problems and I will close my eyes and let you have everything you want in prison—cell phones, girls, drugs, marijuana, cocaine, drinks and everything. Everyone is happy with that. The prison director is happy, there are no riots. The guards are happy they have their money—everything comes in by bribes. The PCC is happy because they have their drugs, their phones.”

But ubiquitous access to cell phones has long stymied efforts by government officials to dismantle the PCC. In October 2013, the São Paulo government announced that it was installing cell phone jammers in dozens of prisons throughout the state. The idea was to isolate the PCC leaders and prevent them from maintaining fluid communications with their lieutenants down the hierarchy.

The focus of the jamming was on Mauricio Henrique Guimaraes Pereira Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility in the west of the state that houses Marcola, the PCC's supreme leader. But prisoners instantly found holes in the coverage; areas of the prison known as “shadows” were found to still have cell phone signals. And it was a cell phone call by a PCC prisoner that alerted prison authorities to an escape plot that involved renting two helicopters, shielding them with bulletproof armor and then hovering over the prison yard to whisk away the PCC leaders.

While authorities touted their ability to upend the Hollywood style helicopter rescue, more somber analysts wondered what it said about the ability to effectively cut off communications to PCC leaders. Even if the cell phone jamming works, the prisoners are likely to remain one step ahead. PCC members have now been monitored as they attempted to buy satellite phones for use in prison. These phones would bypass the normal cell phone circuits and could likely include encryption.

he PCC's interest in telecommunications goes well beyond placing and receiving phone calls. They have also invested in attempts to record cell conversations. In a series of PCC conversations intercepted in January 2008, Brazilian police listened as top PCC leaders negotiated with their lawyers to buy a surveillance system known as “Guardian," which is allegedly capable of simultaneously monitoring more than a thousand cell phones conversations. The PCC discovered that the Brazilian Federal Police used “Guardian” to coordinate investigations that required massive phone surveillance. The machines are sold in Miami, and after setting up a front company, the PCC prepared to send a corrupt lawyer to Miami to purchase the machine for a cool $320,000.

Brazilian police foiled the plot by arresting the lawyer before the Miami trip, but the PCC's goal remains clear—to establish what the Brazil press dubbed “a parallel intelligence agency” in which they would record the conversations of top police commanders and politicians. With a network powered by a glut of cheap, easily-smuggled phones, the PCC seeks to create a wholesale reversal of justice in which prisoners investigate politicians, find their crimes, and punish them.

Jonathan Franklin is the author of 33 Men, the bestselling saga of the trapped Chilean miners. He lives and works in South America where he is a frequent contributor to the Guardian and the Washington Post. Follow him @FranklinBlog.

FYI Watsapp is an encrypted service.Data must be decrypted to be useful. This is why criminals like it. 

James wrote:
"If the same situationice. had happened in the USA or Canada, the judge would find his ass in a sling,"

The truth is:
Western governments, including the United States and Britain, have pressed technology companies to modify their services to permit the authorities to monitor communications upon demand.

The debate intensified after the Paris terrorist attacks in November. Intelligence officials said that the plotters may have used encryption technology to conceal their communications.

==============================================================================
Cellphone seizures rising in Canadian prisons
Seizures double in recent years as correctional officials try to prevent their clandestine use in drug trafficking and organized crime.

Officials are grappling with how to keep the phones out of institutions and stop inmates from using the devices that do slip behind bars.

Worldwide, prisons are struggling to deal with the problem of how to keep cellphones out of the hands of inmates, says an internal briefing note prepared for senior Public Safety officials.

New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, France and Mexico are using jamming technology in some prisons, says the March 2012 note, disclosed under the access law. The United States introduced legislation in 2009 to allow jamming in institutions, though the bill died the following year.

As you are aware, access to a cellphone provided inmates the continuous potential to be involved in criminal activities outside the institution  including drug trafficking and organized crime activities  from within an institution, the note says.
=============================================================================
An inmate escaped from a Kansas prison allegedly with the aid of a phone smuggled in by an accomplice.1 In Texas, a death row inmate charged with killing four persons, including two teenage girls, allegedly used a wireless phone from within the prison to threaten a prominent state senator and his family.2 These incidents serve as just two examples where individuals used cell phones to facilitate criminal acts from within a correctional institution.

The authors have examined the real and potential dangers that inmate wireless phone possession poses not only to prison and jail personnel and other prisoners but to the community at large. Their study focused particularly on the methods of concealment, as well as prevention strategies, including detection and proposed legislation, to minimize the harm of cell phone use by inmates.

Possession by Prisoners

A study of Kentucky correctional personnel found that 92.2 percent believed that inmates should have telephone privileges.3 At least one court has suggested that prisoners may have a right to access.4 However, it is important to acknowledge that this right has limitations. Restrictions may not only limit the number of persons an inmate may call but dictate that none of the individuals have a criminal record.5 As a general matter, correctional staff may monitor inmate calls when pursuant to a policy statement and when prisoners receive reasonable notice that monitoring of telephone conversations might occur (although a different analysis likely would apply to legal communications).6 Finally, authorities may impose restrictions on telephone use based on the security level in which an inmate is housed.7

Even despite such limitations, inmate telephone use sometimes may facilitate criminal activity. A recent report concluded that a significant number of inmates use prison telephones to commit serious crimes.8 While prisoners may use their cell phones for benign purposes, such as maintaining contact with family and friends, the devices also may provide inmates with an avenue for conducting criminal activity without concerns about the restrictions imposed on landline telephone use.

We are not talking about depriving prisoners to access to telephones, which this country couldn't accomplish in a million years anyway due to total apathy of the government.

What we are talking about is depriving millions of users of a service that is LEGAL because of the ruling of one criminal judge who wouldn't understand the Constitution of this country if somebody spoon fed it to him. Would you as an American allow anyone, even a judge, to trample your Constitutional rights? I think not.

This order was, unconstitutional, it was also under all definitions in this country an abuse of authority, but here judges do that all the time, as one Transit Officer recently found out when she tried to arrest a judge in a Drunk Driving roadblock (Lei Seca Blitz). The judge was not only driving drunk, but driving a car with no license plates, stacks of unpaid fines, 27 points on his Driver's License, no Driver's License or Registration in his possession. During the operation she tried to arrest him and he pulled the usual "do you know who you're talking to?" "I'm a judge!" bullshit. She responded, "You may be a judge, but you're not God!" It was at this point that he ordered HER arrested and not only was she arrested he sued her and some other "God in a Black Robe" ordered her to pay R$5000 in damages to the drunken sod. This is Brazil.... no further explanation needed.

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team

We are talking about convicted criminals (not an easy task here) using an encrypted service to commit even more crimes and organize themselves better. The service providers claim not to be able to decrypt their own code.  In the meantime only law enforcement officers and their families are being murdered. For now.

Convicted criminals are where they are because they reject the rights of society. I object to cruel and unusal punisment but we are not running a Hilton for murderers. No one is saying that the only way to solve this is to shut own service to everyone---except the services themselves.

I take it everyone knows that anything sent through these services belongs to the service, right? It is therefore completely up to them to work with the authorities to limit the MISUSE of social networks

This is why the NSA collects ALL transmissions and uses that fact to justify collecting ALL transmissions.  Circular arguments all around.

The people are being held hostage here.
===============================================================================
Officials involved in the investigation of the Paris terror attacks have revealed they believe some of the terrorists used encrypted apps WhatsApp and Telegram to plot and communicate.

While it was previously known the apps were found on terrorists' mobiles investigators now say they were used in communications for "a period of time before the attacks". It is the first time officials have revealed they have evidence on what the apps, which offer end-to-end encryption to hide anything that was said in message exchanges, were used for, they told CNN.

Those close to the investigation state "the apps were used in communication among the terrorists"  however exactly what was said may never be known as the encryption is impossible to crack. The terrorists also frequently swapped out sim cards in their mobile phones to avoid surveillance.

However some unencrypted data was recovered from at least one mobile phone, where the user may have slipped up and used a different form of communication. The investigation continues as officials attempt to string together further clues.

The news the terrorists used encrypted messaging apps to operate will strengthen the case for governments who are currently fighting tech companies with court orders to allow them access to data. Apple's iMessage and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) are just two platforms that offer encryption even they cannot decipher.

FBI Director James Comey spoke at the New York Police Department headquarters saying "the use of encryption is at the centre of terrorist trade craft."

Both have been resisting the wishes to remove encryption and even strengthened their services following Edward Snowden's revelation about government surveillance plans.

IBTimes exposed encrypted messaging service Telegram to be one of the main methods of communication between members of Isis and a tool to spread propaganda. There was, at one point, over 10,000 Isis followers across more than 50 channels on the app  however Telegram swiftly began shutting down and blocking broadcasts following the Paris attacks that left 130 dead and hundreds more injured.

It also follows the news that Brazil has banned WhatsApp for 48-hours as a result of failing to cooperate with a court order that demanded it hand over encrypted data involving an organised crime case.

I concur with Tim Cook, Apple CEO in this area. If you open a back door for law enforcement you open a back door for criminals as well.

By opening a back door you are inviting PCC, ISIS, Or whomever else is the enemy-du-jour to then access YOUR information as well. They will get your passwords, your financial data, your location for kidnappings. Did you not see in one of the previous articles that the PCC was trying to purchase the "Guardian" system to track calls??? Not to mention that as we see the levels of corruption in the Brazilian system (for example) whats to say the "authorities" might not use that data or messaging against it's citizens, although that's not just a Brazilian problem.

Back to the original issue, the Judge had no right under the Brazilian constitution to suspend service. Moreover most people (especially like judges and legislators) don't understand the way these technologies and terms of use work. Often the data IS NOT owned in any way by the provider. And the provider cannot access that data by design. Like a phone company does not own the content of your calls.

Read your TOS contracts of your providers and the "free" apps you've loaded onto your phones. "Privacy" is currency today. That is why providers fight so hard not to cooperate with Law enforcement. The defence offered up by watsapp was the encryption of the messages. They claimed to be unable to decrypt their own code.

Officials involved in the investigation of the Paris terror attacks have revealed they believe some of the terrorists used encrypted apps WhatsApp and Telegram to plot and communicate.

While it was previously known the apps were found on terrorists' mobiles investigators now say they were used in communications for "a period of time before the attacks". It is the first time officials have revealed they have evidence on what the apps, which offer end-to-end encryption to hide anything that was said in message exchanges, were used for, they told CNN.

Those close to the investigation state "the apps were used in communication among the terrorists"  however exactly what was said may never be known as the encryption is impossible to crack. The terrorists also frequently swapped out sim cards in their mobile phones to avoid surveillance.

However some unencrypted data was recovered from at least one mobile phone, where the user may have slipped up and used a different form of communication. The investigation continues as officials attempt to string together further clues.

The news the terrorists used encrypted messaging apps to operate will strengthen the case for governments who are currently fighting tech companies with court orders to allow them access to data. Apple's iMessage and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) are just two platforms that offer encryption even they cannot decipher.

FBI Director James Comey spoke at the New York Police Department headquarters saying "the use of encryption is at the centre of terrorist trade craft."

Both have been resisting the wishes to remove encryption and even strengthened their services following Edward Snowden's revelation about government surveillance plans.

IBTimes exposed encrypted messaging service Telegram to be one of the main methods of communication between members of Isis and a tool to spread propaganda. There was, at one point, over 10,000 Isis followers across more than 50 channels on the app  however Telegram swiftly began shutting down and blocking broadcasts following the Paris attacks that left 130 dead and hundreds more injured.

It also follows the news that Brazil has banned WhatsApp for 48-hours as a result of failing to cooperate with a court order that demanded it hand over encrypted data involving an organised crime case.

Remember that the convicted criminals here in Brasil have used these services to control the prisions and arrange the murder of law enforcement officers.

We should be looking for a solution the the real problem.  Criminal and terrorist use of these systems vs the well being of our society. Trust me IT CAN BE DONE.

exyner,

That's all well and good, but the fact remains that this is Brazil and not the USA. The original order made by the judge in São Bernardo do Campo had absolutely no validity in the USA since it was not registered for enforcement in a US Court and that is why WhatsApp chose simply to refuse to comply. The order had no legal force outside of Brazil.

With regard to the issuance of an order blocking of services for all Brazilian users that was a clear violation of Art. 5 § II of the Federal Constitution of 1988. Millions of users who had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the criminal case or with WhatsApp were deprived of their Constitutional right. That is the only issue we're dealing with here. We are not dealing with the issue of whether or not we should be allowing "Big Brother" to access any and all of our private conversations on a whim. Even if we were my vote would still be a resounding NO because the Constitution does not permit it.

The breakiing of telecommunications privacy is a very serious issue, and while it is clear that the police (with authorization of the courts) had the right to intercept the communications of the defendants in the case, but beyond that everything they did was inconstitutional or a feable attempt to make an extraterritorial order stick. They thought that they could bluff their way through like they often do here in Brazil, but they goofed. So they make innocent and uninvolved people pay the price with another inconstitutional move. Any way you slice it the whole incident is shameless.

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team

James.

This is an international issue. Every time one of these companies manages to block the law by claiming privacy rights in other countries (watsapp is part of FB), the bad guys get stronger. If these companies cooperated with governments, the murderers would look to other less secure and immediate means of communications. A solution can be found, if they would only try.

Remember Brasil was targeting convicted prisoners who were ordering the murders of law enforcement officers. They were not trying to find out what everyone was doing.

The NSA gets past the Privacy argument by spying on EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME. They say since the record everyone, no one is injured.  I fear this will be the model Brasilia will eventually adopt.

(CNN)Reports Wednesday that three men have been arrested over plans to travel from New York to join ISIS -- and that one of them allegedly posted online about his desire to shoot the President of the United States -- is simply the latest reminder that terrorist groups and their sympathizers are exploiting the freedom of cyberspace.
Earlier this month, ISIS posted a video of its horrific burning of a captured Jordanian pilot. Unfortunately, this was not the first time ISIS has used Twitter, an American social media company, to broadcast its barbaric acts to the world. In August, when ISIS released the gruesome beheading of American journalist James Foley, it also used social media. In fact, ISIS has been using Twitter for years.
Nor is ISIS the only terrorist group on Twitter.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the al Qaeda branch in Syria, al-Nusra Front, are all on Twitter. On January 14, the al Qaeda branch in Yemen, known as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or simply AQAP, claimed responsibility via Twitter for the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 17 people. The group has two official accounts on Twitter.
There are many more examples from such groups, all of which have officially been listed as foreign designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. It's with this reality in mind that on January 27, my subcommittee held a hearing on terrorists' use of social media. At those hearings, experts detailed how terrorist use of social media platforms has long been a problem.
If social media is being used to help radicalize thousands of people and raise millions of dollars from many more, the question all this raises is this: Why is no one shutting them down? Because American companies aren't. And nor is the American government.
I've heard two arguments for why we should keep the status quo.
The first -- and easiest to set aside -- is the claim that if the U.S. government were to shut down terrorists' social media accounts, these measures would be violating terrorists' free speech rights.
My own belief is that the Constitution does not apply to terrorists.
These thugs gave up their right to free speech the first time they killed innocent civilians. We should certainly not be helping them kill more. But this isn't just my thinking.
The Supreme Court has already held this to be the case in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, when it ruled that if someone has aided a terrorist organization, their free speech rights were not protected. Indeed, free speech does not apply when it harms others, such as creating and distributing child pornography.
The second argument is that terrorists' use of social media provides the intelligence community with information that they would not otherwise be able to acquire. But while terrorists may slip up from time to time, they are also aware that by its very nature, social media is about sharing, which means what they say can easily become widely shared.
Nor is terrorist use of social media a new phenomenon. We have had years to weigh the kind of intelligence that we can gather about terrorist groups against the advantages in messaging and recruitment that terrorists gain from it. And from what I have heard, allowing this public, online jihad to continue has provided no significant intelligence breakthroughs. The fact that there are more terrorists using social media than ever before should say all we need to know about whether they are benefiting from it.
To put it bluntly, private American companies should not be operating as the propaganda megaphone of foreign terrorist organizations.
So what needs to change?
For a start, social media companies themselves need to do more. It is not good enough to only pay attention when bad press threatens a company's public image after something truly horrific is posted online. Instead, companies not only have a public responsibility but a legal obligation to do more.
Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that it is unlawful to provide a designated foreign terrorist organization with "material support or resources," including "any property, tangible or intangible, or services."
That's about as comprehensive as you can get.
What's more, most social media companies already have terms of service with prohibition of threats of violence that would preclude terrorist use of their platforms. But companies need to do a better job of enforcing their own terms. The lack of child pornography or stolen copyrighted material on social media platforms -- content that is quickly removed if it appears at all -- demonstrates what these companies can do.
With this in mind, they would do well to consider having dedicated teams that remove terrorist content, and also streamline reporting processes for offensive content so users can easily report terrorist use on their platforms. Companies have the technology and the resources to crack down on terrorists' use of their platform; they just need the motivation to act.
This is where the federal government can assist.
In 2011, the White House promised a strategy to prevent online radicalization. But more than three years later -- and despite a summit last week aimed at tackling extremism -- we are still waiting on that strategy. Without one, the federal government's efforts to combat terrorist use of social media will be as haphazard and lackluster as the efforts of private social media companies. Instead, we need a strategy that clearly articulates our goals and roles, and the responsibilities of each federal agency that needs to be involved, as well as how we are going to work with civil society.
It is mind boggling to think that those who behead and burn others alive are able to use our own companies against us to further their cause. But that is exactly what is occurring.
American newspapers would have never allowed the Nazis to place an ad for recruitment during World War II. Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations should not be allowed to use private American companies to reach billions of people with their violent propaganda in an instant, all for free.

HARI SREENIVASAN: One official at the helm of the U.S. governments fight against terrorism is the Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
Carlin oversees 75 criminal cases that have been brought in the past 18 months against alleged supporters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS or ISL.
The majority allegedly tried to travel abroad and a quarter are accused of plots on U.S. soil.
In an interview earlier this week, Carlin laid out the threat that ISIS represents.
JOHN CARLIN: Were facing a new threat when it comes to terrorism. The Islamic State, what they did is they decided to crowd source terrorism. And they exploited US technology companies: Twitter, Facebook, Google, others that do so much good, but they exploited them for their terrorist aims.
What they did is they bombarded thousands and thousands of propaganda messages all over the world. Then, when they had someone on the hook through social media, what they would do is often take them into a private, encrypted direct messaging forum, and youd have a terrorist overseas talking to a kid here in the United States, and further walk them down that path of radical, radicalization.
And while their success rate is very small, all it takes is a relatively small number to pose a big problem.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Youre talking about fighting an idea. Youre talking about fighting an idea with all the modern tools and technologies that exist today to spread ideas.
How do you stop someone from proselytizing across Twitter?
JOHN CARLIN: We very much need the same folks who had the innovative idea to create these products, to focus on the solution. They dont want their businesses used by terrorism.
So we need to work in partnership with them to keep terrorists overseas from targeting our kids. Weve brought over 75 criminal cases against terrorists in the U.S. system.
In the beginning, they used to mostly be foreign terrorist fighters, those who want to go join this group overseas. We need to be concerned, once those guys get that training overseas, that they dont come back and use it to commit terrorist attacks inside the United States or in western Europe.
ISIL started saying, No passport required, no travel required, we call on you to commit attacks, terrorist attacks where you live. Kill innocents around where you live. And weve seen people answer that call in Australia, in Canada, in France, in Belgium.
Here in America, were not seeing any particular ethnic group or geographic group answer the call. Instead, the trend is almost every case involved social media. Over half these cases involve individuals 25 or younger, and most troubling, a-third involve kids that are 21 or under.
Weve never seen that problem here before when it comes to terrorist threats.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So how do you stop that? It used to be that you could say, Listen, lets have the religious leader, the local pastor, the local imam intervene on our behalf, right?
When youre talking about someone whos under 25, they might be listening to Twitter and Instagram a lot more than their parents.
JOHN CARLIN: Thats a very good point, and a concerning one. These corporations that provide these services, and their advertisers, are really good at figuring out whos listening to what, and how to change minds.
We need their help to make sure that the terrorists arent out there using their services to pinpoint individuals. The same way weve done campaigns against sexual predators.
Because I think a lot of parents out there, you know, they dont necessarily know what their kid is up to when theyre down in the basement online, or when theyre walking around using their phones on social media.
And it used to be the assessment of the intelligence community that before someone would become a terrorist, they would need to meet someone in the real world, face-to-face, who would walk them down that path.
But that assessments changed, especially with this generation thats used to trusting people online. And we need to adjust accordingly.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How do you see encryption as a problem? Especially with telecom companies?
JOHN CARLIN: You have the terrorist overseas. Once theyre in direct contact, they use American-made technology thats pushed out for free and has many good purposes, to directly communicate. And what Ill find, from where we sit, is well get a warrant. 
We go to serve it on the company, and the company says, yes, this is legal process, but we are technically unable to effectuate the court process. We cant tell you what theyre saying.
We cant tell you what theyre writing to each other. Thats a major problem for law enforcement intelligence, because thats been a critical, the ability to do those intercepts has been a critical tool.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So is there a concern that, if you ask a company to say, decrypt all conversations, youre also threatening my right to have private speech and my ability to whisper a secret to you.
JOHN CARLIN: So I think what we need to do is have a balance between protecting our national security, but what we are protecting is our way of life, which includes our civil liberties and our privacy.
And we can and have done both. So what theyre looking for now in partnership is saying, look, what were looking for is specific targeted ability to do an intercept when we have a lawful court order. And were asking for a technical means to be able to effectuate the court order.
Folks in government dont need to have that solution, we just need the company to be able to do it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Carlin also oversees federal prosecutions for hacking, as hackers overseas increasingly attack U.S. companies and government agencies.
One big case involves a 20-year-old from Kosovo, living in Malaysia, who allegedly stole personal data of U.S. military members and gave it to ISIS, which posted the names online and encouraged followers to attack them.
HARI SREENIVASAN: A guy from Kosovo, sitting in Malaysia, is able to hack and find the addresses of 1,400 military service members. How do you stop that?
JOHN CARLIN: This wasnt a small-scale crook. It was an extremist from Kosovo whod moved to Malaysia, was hacking into their system for the purpose of providing it to a British-born terrorist, Junaid Hussain, who was living in Raqqa, Syria, and associated with a designated terrorist group, the Islamic State.
He was culling through that information to look for military and government addresses, and then was again using US technology, Twitter and other services, to broadcast that out and say, Heres the identity of these individuals, heres where they live, kill them.
We were able to arrest this individual, and hes pending extradition from Malaysia. And the person to whom he was giving the information, according to a public statement from CENTCOM, was killed in a military strike.

The whole issue boils down to the sovereignty of nations. Would you as an American citizen sit still for any other country on earth trying to enforce its laws in the USA? I think not, and since WhatsApp is an American company they had every right to tell the Brazilian judge to stuff his order, which had no legal force outside of Brazil. That is NOT the issue here, but it appears you are trying to make it the issue.

The issue here is the singular issue of a judge in Brazil, overstepping his legal authority and making another order which went so far as to violate the Federal Constitution of 1988. No law in Brazil, no matter when enacted, and no order of any court in this land is valid if it does not comply strictly with the Constitution. That is the point of this topic thread.

Please, don't compare apples and oranges. I am not, nor are you, nor are any of the millions of other users of WhatsApp defendants in the original criminal action that gave rise to the order to break the privacy of the communications. Under our Constitution we cannot be held responsible or penalized in any way. The judge hoped that Brazilians simply wouldn't know any better when he ordered the Brazilian telephone operators to block the service. The judge involved simply resorted to the old childish, "my d*ck's bigger than your d*ck" battle, not caring that his authority does not extend beyond the territorial limits of Brazil. He issued a wholly ILLEGAL order and that is why it was overturned.

Nobody here is supporting the defendants, nobody here is trying to protect them from being punished for their actions. The issue here is one of the Constitutional rights of every citizen and resident of this country and protecting them from being trampled. We have far too many judges in this country who are of the distinct impression that they are more powerful than Almighty God. From time to time somebody has to stomp on them and put them in their place, or we start down that slippery slope to this country becoming a pure dictatorship.

Please, you can make all the arguments you wish as to why the criminals should not have any special protection. I'm not suggesting that they should. However what happened here apart from being a clear violation of black letter law and of the Constitution puts the rights of everyone in this country at risk. That wouldn't be tolerated in the USA or Canada without a fight, nor should it be here in Brazil. You don't just gut the Constitution with the stroke of a pen, at least not if you're a lowly judge. There is a process for Constitutional Amendments, and that was not the case here.

I will be asking that this topic thread be closed, because it is becoming too much of a platform for political statements. Our Constitution is crystal clear, what was tried here violated that Constitution... end of story!

Cheers,
James
expat.com Experts Team