Brazil passes anti-spy Internet bill

Brazilian politicians in the country's lower chamber of Congress celebrate the passing of a law on Tuesday that guarantees Luis Macedo / Camara Dos Deputados For China Daily

Law protects online privacy, sets limits on use of metadata

Brazil's lower chamber of Congress approved groundbreaking legislation on Tuesday aimed at guaranteeing equal access to the Internet and protecting the privacy of its users in the wake of US spying revelations.

To ensure passage of the bill, the government had to drop a contentious provision that would have required global Internet companies to store data on Brazilian servers inside the country.

The rule was added last year to proposed Internet governance legislation after revelations that the US National Security Agency had spied on the personal communications of Brazilians, including those of President Dilma Rousseff.

Instead, the bill says companies such as Google and Facebook are subject to Brazilian laws and courts in cases involving information on Brazilians, even if the data is stored on servers abroad.

The government refused to drop another key provision on Net neutrality that was opposed by telecommunications companies because it bars them from charging higher prices for different content, such as video streaming and voice services such as Skype.

The legislation, dubbed Brazil's "Internet Constitution", protects freedom of expression and sets limits on the gathering and use of metadata about Internet users.

Experts, such as World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have praised the bill for balancing the rights and duties of individuals, governments and corporations, while ensuring the Internet continues to be an open and decentralized network.

Following the spying revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including allegations that the NSA secretly collected data stored on servers by Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo, Brazil sought to force them to store data on Brazilian servers in the country.

Internet companies complained that this would push up their costs and create barriers to the free flow of information.

Those with offices in Brazil have been fined for not complying with Brazilian laws, but it is not clear how companies based elsewhere can be made to comply, for instance, with court orders to remove disputed content from the Internet.

"The law is balanced because it protects Internet access and privacy at the same time," said lawyer Jose Nantala, with the Peixoto e Cury law firm in Sao Paulo. "But it doesn't resolve the problem of jurisdiction in international cases," he said.

The revelations of NSA espionage using powerful surveillance programs upset relations between the US and Brazil and led Rousseff to cancel a state visit to Washington in October and denounce massive electronic surveillance of the Internet in a speech to the UN General Assembly.

Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, another leader allegedly spied on by the NSA, have led international efforts to limit mass electronic surveillance. Brazil will host a global conference on the future of Internet governance next month.

In a separate development, US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that US intelligence agencies were not snooping on ordinary citizens but admitted it would take time to win back the trust of European governments and people.

Snowden's disclosures about the sweep of the NSA's monitoring activities triggered a national debate over privacy rights in the US and also damaged US ties with some European governments.

Obama said one of the aims of his trip to Europe this week was to reassure allies that he was acting to meet their concerns by limiting the scope of data-gathering.

"I am confident that everybody in our intelligence agencies operates in the best of intentions and is not snooping into the privacy of ordinary Dutch, German, French or American citizens," Obama told reporters after a nuclear security summit in The Hague.

However, Obama said he recognized that "because of these revelations, there is a process that is taking place where we have to win back the trust, not just of governments, but more importantly of ordinary citizens, and that is not going to happen overnight".