Last week, I mentioned Brazilian requirements for local data storage. What does everyone think about this new proposal out of Brazil to create an email competitor to the major U.S. email providers:
The Brazilian government is planning to develop a national email system that is protected from the sort of espionage that the US National Security Agency carries out.
The government has already been working with the national postal agency Correios to develop the new commercial email system, providing an alternative to the likes of Gmail and Hotmail, which would guarantee the veracity of documents and offer functions such as a delivery certification showing when an email has been read by the recipient.
However, in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of US government digital surveillance, Brazil's Communication Ministry has requested to extend the project into a national service. The new system would include encryption and have servers based in Brazil.
American companies such as Google and Microsoft are obliged to share their users' data with the NSA. In fact, in the last eight months of 2012, Hotmail, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provided law enforcement agencies with information on 64,000 users. The NSA can reportedly also tap into three-quarters of the data flowing through the US internet and has legal power to subpoena international communications.
This has led Germany's Minister of the Interior to tell companiesnot to use services that go through American servers if they are concerned about privacy. The French government is also working to build a domestic cloud infrastructure to compete with the dominant US companies.
As with data storage, we are talking about services here, so the existence of GATS commitments will be important. And there is the question of whether any government actions could be justified under GATS Article XIV(c)(ii) as necessary for "the protection of the privacy of individuals in relation to the processing and dissemination of personal data and the protection of confidentiality of individual records and accounts".
