In April 28th 2014 a representative of the brazilian Public Ministry (Ministério Público Federal -- MPF) took the hard disks of the main server of Saravá Group, taking down many servers hosted by the group. In a negotiation with the Saravá Group, it was agreed that the MPF would only take the disks and leave the machine untouched.
In accordance with its letter of principles, Saravá Group protects the data in its servers using cryptography. There is no access key in power of the Campinas State University (Unicamp), so there is no way for the university to provide the data to anyone that requires it. It is also worth to note that in Brazil there is no legal mechanism that enforces the Saravá Group to hand over the hard disks' encryption keys. This way, using strong, well implemented and security-community recomended encryption, users' data is not under risk of being violated.
After the action and departure of the MPF from the university, we installed new disks on the server and in less than 2 hours it was back online. Some systems and services related to the old server are still offline, but they are being restored through remote backups. We still intend to generate new encrypted connection certificates (HTTPS/SSL/TLS) as a prevention measure.
Saravá Groups is a horizontal, nonprofit organization run by volunteers who maintain the group structure through donations. It is by thinking on giving acces to secure tools that collaborate with articulation and organization of research groups, collectives and individuals, that Saravá offers services for free, trying to establish a relation of cooperation and mutual help amongst groups, collectives and individuals that are part of its neighborhood/community.
[de] Ein bisschen Chaos für Brasilien
Der alljährlich stattfindende Chaos Communication Congress fasziniert nicht nur in Deutschland die Hackergemeinde. Auch in Brasilien schauen technisch interessierte Menschen in diesen Tagen sehr genau nach Hamburg bzw. auf die Website des 30C3.
Nach den Protesten im Juni und der sich in diesem Umfeld entwickelnden Diskussion um alternative Medien spielt das Internet und andere digitale Kommunikationskanäle in Brasilien eine immer größere Rolle. Deshalb verlassen wir (natürlich nur virtuell) den 30C3 um uns mit HacktivistInnen aus Brasilien (u.a. vom Sarava Kollektiv) über netzpolitische Themen austauschen. Wir unterhalten uns unter anderem über Netzneutralität und die Auswirkungen der Snowden-Leaks auf Brasilien.
Hier nachhören:
http://fabzgy.org/wordpress/2013/12/29/de-ein-bisschen-chaos-fur-brasilien/