Nym Squads speak out: TupiNymQuim on the ground in Brazil

Reflections on the fight for democracy, online privacy, and freedom

Author: Nym

September 11, 202410 mins read

Reflections on the fight for democracy, online privacy, and freedom

Following last week’s Nym Dispatch on the recent banning of X/Twitter in Brazil, as well as the use of VPNs to access the platform, Nym reached out to one of our beloved and dedicated Squads on the ground in Brazil, TupiNymQuim, to get their response and perspective.

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A bit of background: TupiNymQuim is Nym’s first Brazilian community squad. Its name comes from the combination of “tupinimquim,” a way of referring to “things made in Brazil” and its indigenous people + Nym. The squad focuses on the decentralized management of the Lusophone community, operating more than 20 nodes, and representing Nym at events. The group is made up of programmers and software engineering students with an interest in hacktivism and the defense of privacy.

The following is a guest post authored by two members of TupiNymQuim on what is happening in their country regarding the social effects of big tech and social media platforms, democratic struggles, and the free access to information and communication technologies.

X (Twitter), VPNs, and the threshold between privacy, freedom, and crime

The issue is simple: if VPNs did what they were supposed to do, governments wouldn’t know which sites you access. But things aren’t so simple.

The problem

As commentators on the recent escalation surrounding the suspension of X in Brazil, it’s important to refuse two things simultaneously:

A false and empty notion of the freedom of expression to legitimize crimes and extremist political projects
The overthrow of a platform that still remained relevant to the Brazilian public debate

Even if the criticism of the worsening quality of X, formerly known as Twitter, was legitimate, the reality is that the platform was a still relevant vehicle for information and communication in Brazil, especially in the political sphere.

But the controversy surrounding Minister Alexandre de Moraes’ decision to take down the platform in Brazil is the culmination of a more serious problem. How do we behave towards individuals who have a mega-infrastructure (and fortune) being used to make their extremist political positions echo so loudly?

The immunity in which big tech companies operate with their supposed political neutrality is just a chimera aimed at protecting their own image and business. When politically relevant, these companies end up supporting political projects out of self-interest, as recently happened in the Brazilian Congress.

The truth is that it’s easy to stay out of controversy when the criteria for what can and can’t be viralized are in their custody. Or rather, when it’s hidden in thousands of lines of closed code, ultimately unknown to society as a whole.

If big tech and X present themselves as convenient means of accessing information relevant to public life, why aren’t they auditable? And more importantly, what can we do when a select owner of one of these networks shouts in favor of an extreme right-wing agenda?

Why do billionaires see themselves as superhumans?

In the end, Elon Musk simply saw another business opportunity with his control of a network that yields such an enormous influence on political debate. Instead of strategic silence, the entrepreneur opted for the targeted use of X’s toxic noise in order to increase his revenue in other businesses.

Source

Hypocrisy is hardly not enough to describe Musk’s behavior. By rivaling a young democracy like Brazil’s, which recently resisted and defeated an anti-democratic coup, and by silencing himself and posing alongside authoritarian leaders, Musk reveals that his fight for the freedom of expression ends when it is no longer convenient.

Instead of questioning the absurdities of Musk’s Trumpist stance (and its necessary link to the implosion of democracy), we might as well ask: why do we allow the voice of a single individual, especially a wealthy one, to echo so loudly? Why do we let him dictate the axes of this debate on his network? Why do we listen to his empty rantings instead of putting him in his place?

We say: he is no more than a parasite who doesn’t care about any agenda other than his own enrichment.

The truth is that society lets this abyssal discrepancy grow as we fail to combat big tech. This happens when we accept abusive privacy terms, let them interfere in our elections, or allow network infrastructures to be increasingly concentrated in their hands.

In addition to combating Musk’s extremist messages, we need to regulate the actions of individuals who yield so much influence over the structure of communications, giving them disproportionate influence over ideological views (whether democratic or anti-democratic).

The democracy of judges

Moraes [who declared the ban on X] was appointed to the Supreme Court by the previous president Michel Temer. Temer took over the presidency after carrying out a coup in coalition with Congress to oust the then-president Dilma Rousseff. Moraes was also Temer’s Justice Minister before being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Having maintained close ties with the right-wing in São Paulo for more than 20 years, Moraes saw the political niche in which he had built himself collapse. After 2016, the traditional Brazilian right, which had been building itself up over 30 years of democracy, was quickly replaced by Bolsonarism. With the old right now almost extinct, Moraes migrated from conservatism to the opposite political spectrum.

In 2016, Moraes, as Minister of Justice, cutting cannabis plants in a campaign to “eradicate marijuana in Brazil”

Having recently voted in favor of decriminalizing marijuana, Moraes now shows that, in addition to being a judge, he is really a political chameleon adapting himself to the situation he finds himself in. How might he have acted if he had been judging not the anti-democratic acts of Bolsonaro in 2023, but rather the beginning of that coup challenge in 2014 made by the candidate Aécio Neves, from his former party, the PSDB? Are the crimes committed by the right-wing political milieu from which Moraes grew up less serious than the opposite spectrum in which he now finds himself?

These rhetorical questions only serve to challenge the fairness of politically appointed judges. They also serve as a critique of the recent concentration of power in the hands of the judiciary and the possible risks to Brazilian democracy, which often sees the institutional position of judges shielded from the abuses they commit and the controversies in which they become involved.

Sculpture “A justiça” [To justice] vandalized. Source

A fundamental principle of democracy is the existence of a balance between the different poles of power (judicial, executive, and parliamentary). However, how can we protect ourselves when this balance is broken? Or when it is theoretically coherent but widely disregarded in practice? What risks do we run when we see a judiciary that increasingly rules by decree and gives extraordinary powers to its leaders?

How do governments watch you?

In a nutshell: through the exchange of information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), either voluntarily or through judicial subpoenas. In Brazil, some of the ISPs are Claro, Vivo, and TIM. Even if your content is encrypted, all the metadata of your communication (such as where you talk from, or who you talk to, or the size of your data — whether it’s text, image, video — is exposed.

We inherited the choice made not to build privacy into the architecture of the Internet, and now we are suffering from a broken network dominated by large conglomerates — including a few companies forming the basis for the network’s hardware — who are symbiotically linked to corporate and state surveillance.

But all that was solved with VPNs, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as a technology are weak due to an architectural choice: if we don’t trust our ISPs and believe that they will leak our information to third parties, why trust a VPN? In that case, we’re just transferring trust. In a privacy-oriented technology, “having to trust” some institution blindly is a sign of the technology’s weakness.

It would be better to present an open-source, auditable alternative that distributes the influence and management of the network to multiple operators.

Note: We are not supporting the use of X through a VPN right now. The truth is, we don’t even miss X (it was already awful). We’re just warning you that the VPN you use can and probably will reveal your online activity if it’s vehemently subpoenaed (or hacked) — and if you’re using a free VPN*,* check this out.

The abuse of power through decentralization

This is exactly what we’re doing at Nym: creating a new network infrastructure that allows your data packets to travel in a truly anonymous way.

Source

NymVPN is actually supported by the Nym mixnet, which is a decentralized network of servers (nodes) around the globe and managed autonomously by individuals — whether connected to the Nym community or not.

As well as encrypting your data and metadata, the mixnet adds fake traffic and obfuscates the time pattern of packets. This way, it is impossible to trace a packet within the network: not even the node operators can know whose data packet is being distributed.

The Nym mixnet is therefore the only technology that protects you from identification by analyzing the metadata between the network communications.

Thus, distanced from governments and big tech, we are finally enabling online privacy to the extent that we distribute ourselves the income, influence, and responsibility for managing this privacy market.

What’s bad can get worse

Finally, it’s worth noting that Musk’s libertarian hypocrisy is just a glimpse of the possibility of a much worse future.

What will happen if companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which own 65% of today’s cloud servers, start vehemently and publicly expressing their political and economic preferences, as the owner of X now does?

What steps can we take to end government and corporate surveillance on our lives with structural leakage through ISPs and VPNs?

How can we extinguish the plague of big tech that parasitizes human creativity, cognition, and privacy in favor of a freer and more democratic Internet?

Indeed, the road is long, but web3 is emerging as an alternative to break these monopolies and to block companies, governments, and cybercriminals from accessing our private lives once and for all.

Signed,

psydenst & supermeia

TupiNymQuim

Originally published in Portuguese on 12 September 2024.

All the opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Nym Technologies, nor do they necessarily diverge from them.