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 Technology News | November 2007 
Latin America: New ‘Cyber Paradise’ for Pedophiles and Racists?
 Fabiana Frayssinet - IPS
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 |  | Only a few non-governmental organisations are fighting pedophilia, and no Latin American country has created a plan of action specifically to fight crimes like pedophilia and racism on the Internet.
- Thiago Tavares |  | |
Rio de Janeiro - The crackdown in eastern Europe and the United States on websites posting racist content or child pornography could expose Latin America to the risk of becoming a new "cyber paradise" for on-line pedophilia and racism, experts say.
The warning was sounded at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro, which has been discussing issues like security, access and diversity on the net this week.
Many of the websites bearing illegal and harmful content were hosted by the Czech Republic. But after the clampdown they migrated to countries like Panama, according to Thiago Tavares, head of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) SaferNet Brasil.
A law professor at the Catholic University of Salvador (UCSal), Tavares receives information and tracks complaints about cybercrime in Brazil, and has found 100 portals with child pornography content hosted in Panama.
"That set off an alarm," he told IPS.
The expert fears that the large gaps in legislation in Latin American countries may encourage sites with such content.
Among the legal shortcomings, Tavares mentioned the absence of harmonisation between the laws of different countries.
"There’s no cooperation network, policy integration between different countries, or strong social movement. Only a few NGOs are fighting pedophilia, and no Latin American country has created a plan of action specifically to fight crimes like pedophilia and racism on the Internet," he said.
"For all these reasons, the region is highly vulnerable," he said.
In Brazil the highest profile case is that of Orkut, a social networking site operated by Google, which "regrettably became a paradise for cybercrime in Brazil. Thousands of paedophiles and racists use Orkut to distribute child pornography, attract underage children, and commit all sorts of human rights violations," said Tavares.
Brazil’s 35 million Internet users account for over half of those in Latin America as a whole.
Some 25 million people in Brazil visit Orkut, nearly 70 percent of all Internet users in this country of over 188 million people.
According to SaferNet, 1.3 million Internet users in Brazil are children or adolescents who surf the Internet from their homes. Out of these, 53 percent visit social networking and discussion sites like Orkut.
There is no evidence that Orkut carries more illegal or harmful content than other social portals. But since it is such a popular site among Brazilian Internet users, the overall scale of the criminal content is shocking.
In the past two years, 50,000 Internet pages related to human rights crimes and violations, including 19,000 containing child pornography, have been detected, according to SaferNet.
In the view of Tavares and other experts at the IGF, the difficulties the Brazilian authorities have in identifying and punishing Brazilian nationals who use international services like Orkut for criminal activities is the main problem.
Until recently, Google refused to give the authorities information about users identified as suspects by police and judicial enquiries, federal prosecutor Sergio Gardenghi Suiama told IPS.
The prosecutor, who is handling the civil lawsuit against Google in Brazil, said the company argued that user data requested by the judicial authorities was stored in the United States, and therefore prosecution must be under U.S. law.
"We argue that if the crimes were committed by Brazilians, as there is no doubt they were, it is Brazilian law that applies, and Google’s subsidiary in Brazil must answer to the authorities here," he said.
But when the Brazilian government threatened Google with fines and penalties, the company backed down, shared data on some of its Orkut users, and is expediting removal of illegal content from the web.
The California-based Google’s net income for the third quarter of 2007 was over one billion dollars, a 46 percent increase from a year ago. This extraordinary growth was partly due to the "Orkut fever" that has swept Brazil, although the company has lost "millions of dollars" in advertising revenue, Tavares said.
"Google was selling advertising space on its Orkut site, and some ads ended up on pages containing child pornography. When advertisers found out, they started to cancel their contracts," Tavares said. "That was one of the main reasons why Google changed its attitude towards cooperating with Brazilian prosecutors."
Eduardo Fumes Parajo, president of the Brazilian Association of Internet Service Providers (ABRANET), said the association’s members are working on a self-regulated code of conduct, to avoid such conflicts in the future.
In 2005, ABRANET signed an agreement with the office of the public prosecutor to facilitate investigations of child pornography, racism and hate-mongering, which included willingness on the part of Internet providers to hand over user information when requested by the police or the justice system, and to store data on clients for a longer period of time, in order to preserve potential evidence.
"This is a social question. Providers approach this issue as an integral part of their business. No one wants criminal content on their pages or networks. It creates a very negative impression, and advertisers and users themselves stop using the site," said the head of ABRANET, which represents 300 companies, including Microsoft Brazil.
To participants in the forum, which ran Monday through Thursday, the fundamental issue is getting similar or harmonised legislation in an area which recognises neither borders nor cultural differences, like the Internet.
Some have proposed a sort of international tribunal to deal with these cases, under a forum like the United Nations. Others would prefer short and medium term methods, such as setting up cybercrime-busting networks between cooperating countries.
"I don’t think a single tribunal would be able to cope with the cultural diversity of the whole of humanity, present on the Internet," said Tavares, who pointed out that in countries like the Netherlands, erotic images involving children are more common on the Internet, and are more tolerated than in Latin American countries.
Another example is that in the United States, online racism is not such a serious crime as in Brazil, Suiama said.
"I think the main limitation is that we only have national laws to combat a problem that transcends national borders and is in fact transnational," said the prosecutor, who added that he favoured establishing "truly global Internet governance" in the medium term.
But in the immediate future, legal loopholes in countries like Brazil should be closed, he said, nothing that this country still does not have a specific law against possession of child pornography.
The private sector, represented by ABRANET, would prefer ethical self-regulation.
Setting up cooperation networks involving the police, the justice system and civil society, like those already in existence in Europe, is an urgent priority for Latin America, Tavares said for his part. |
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