5 Feet of Fury

Brazillian Government Seeks Identities of “Homophobic” Bloggers

“‘With this agreement, which has already been accepted in Brazil by the providers IG, Terra, Click 21, and AOL, Google would agree to, under judicial order, provide information that will help to discover those who are guilty of crimes,’ Suiama was quoted as saying on the Brazilian government website SaferNet.

“However, the government is not waiting to act. After years of warning Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies to remove offensive material from their systems, a state court has ordered internet service providers to prohibit access to a blog hosted by WordPress.com that fell afoul of the government’s speech codes.”

(…)

“Internet service providers in Brazil, however, are telling the government that they cannot block a single WordPress site at a time, and will be forced to block all of WordPress. In the process, they will eliminate access to the second largest public blogging system in the world, one that includes tens of thousands of Brazilian blogs.”