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By Rodrigo Fragola, Assistant Director of Defense at ASSESPRO-DF and President of Aker
The term "cyber paradise" is not yet indexed in dictionaries and electronic encyclopedias, but its use is being consolidated in meetings of the information security sector. Its meaning still lacks some rigor, but the understanding of the concept, in general, becomes easy when we associate it with the idea of tax havens, already known to all.
In fact, there is a clear similarity between the two expressions. Let's see what motivates the existence of one and the other. What drives a nation to become a tax haven is the interest in attracting part of the global capital to itself through two basic attractions: the first is the offer of a depreciation of government fees on capital, something that financial technicians classify as "tax dumping". The other fatal attraction is the total secrecy that these refuges offer regarding the owner of the amounts deposited there, including the possibility of creating offshore companies that are practically anonymous in their composition.
The motivation for a country to decide to position itself as a cyber paradise can involve complex issues of an economic and geopolitical order, but one of the main ones is undoubtedly the strategic interest in transforming its territory into a privileged pole for the installation of data centers, factories software, global e-commerce companies and all kinds of investments in the web economy.
Like the tax haven, cyber haven offers the digital business operator an excellent trench to defend against "cumbersome" legislation. While the tax haven provides so-called tax dumping, cyber haven offers a true legal blackout, freeing website and business owners from the digital world from having to bow to restrictions, often considered harmful to business. The other irresistible offer, within the scope of the digital refuge, is the extreme point of this blackout: it is anonymity guaranteed for actions taken on the web, which reinforces the anti-judicial safeguards that are in the spirit of the thing.
Described in this way, these two visions of paradise (tax and cybernetics), already raise serious doubts about the windows of opportunity that both open to crime or unfair business practices.
For one and the other, however, there are also favorable arguments that, in the case of tax havens, are often associated with individual freedom, the "sacred" right to self-protection of property and financial privacy, as well as the "legitimate" right that capital private sector must protect itself against the tax voracity of the State.
In the case of cyber havens, they are almost always justified on the grounds of countries' sovereignty and development. Mauritius, for example, a small country in Africa with an economy anchored in sugar cane, tourism and tobacco, started a decade ago to attract companies from the digital world by offering aggressive tax benefits associated with quite a lot of legislation. liberal. With this, the country achieved some important leaps that, in the end, contributed to that the Mauritius Islands today have one of the best HDIs in Africa.
For cyber havens, another favorable argument lies in the service they provide to the struggle for internet freedom by citizens who live under dictatorships and use these refuges as protected sites for an activism that, after all, is viewed very favorably by the global community. of a democratic nature.
However, truth be told, the existence of cyber havens is a much more significant threat to global security than financial havens are to the economy. First, because the financial world has already learned to keep its havens within limits considered to be operationally reasonable. Recent examples, moreover, attest that the anonymity of tax havens has often been broken when there is sufficient evidence of a list of heinous crimes involving offshore accounts.
But as for cyber haven, the situation continues - at least apparently - without any sign of control. And it is not just terrorists, organized crime gangs, pedophiles or drug dealers who rank among the threats anchored in these outlaw screens.
There are cases of thousands of e-commerce companies that transfer their institutional base to such places and thus get rid of inconveniences, for example, such as the Brazilian consumer code and or the more advanced standards of protection of individual data against abuse of data. invasive e-marketing and registration commercialization practices.
The challenges of facing these contradictions of the law are still far from being solved, and the proof of this is the slowness with which the still small number of nations adhere to the Convention on Cyber Crimes of 2001 (also known as the Budapest Convention), although it is this is the oldest and most widespread legal framework on the subject.
The situation leads us to think about that kind of limbo to which the layered overlay of the great global network refers, in which the internet that we use on a daily basis is only the "surface web", which gives rise to the existence of a " Deep Internet ", a space that is not strictly indexed and almost out of legal control. As with the "deep web", against which there is little to do, the existence of cyber havens is being assimilated as a fact of reality. A "natural" reality, with which people, national states and companies will need to live, using, if necessary, the instruments of self-defense that are within their reach.
Among such instruments, it is often observed the application of the old precept of justice of the talion ("eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth"). In recent times, a Malaysian provider has refused to disclose the identity of criminals who maintained a racist website and made death threats against students in Brasília. Without support from institutions in that country, the Brazilian Federal Police had access to wiretaps made on international routers that led to the rapid identification and arrest of those involved. Was this an investigation anchored by international law? Well, what we do know is that the Malaysian court - or its central government - has not issued any kind of protest.
There are cases, however, when the situation is more difficult. From a website in Tokelau, an island in Polynesia, Brazilian fraudsters cloned the portal of the Court of Justice of RS and sent messages to thousands of widow pensioners with the collection of false fees. For using the deep Internet to control their operations (and, therefore, without leaving the fingerprints of their IP to access the site), such criminals remain unidentified and the only possible measure is protection, at least until the writing of this article.
It is possible that cyber havens can only have full control, on reasonable grounds, as a result of the intensification of the so-called digital war and a greater commitment by the great powers to impose a global regulation that prevents the anonymity of criminals and speeds up investigations, in dealing with crimes committed in cyberspace.
While this does not happen, good advice for the citizen is the utmost care when establishing digital transactions with brands and senders of strangers. Checking the origin of the sites (including with search engine search) is an essential care. Another precautionary measure - this one is much more difficult to follow - is to read the terms of subscription to digital services, whether paid or free, with the utmost attention. By clicking "accepted" or "advance", without the annoying reading of these terms, the user is often authorizing his registration data to become public, or to gently integrate the collection of information that this site will sell or use, exclusively, the legal frameworks of the host country, often a tax haven.
In fact, there is a clear similarity between the two expressions. Let's see what motivates the existence of one and the other. What drives a nation to become a tax haven is the interest in attracting part of the global capital to itself through two basic attractions: the first is the offer of a depreciation of government fees on capital, something that financial technicians classify as "tax dumping". The other fatal attraction is the total secrecy that these refuges offer regarding the owner of the amounts deposited there, including the possibility of creating offshore companies that are practically anonymous in their composition.
The motivation for a country to decide to position itself as a cyber paradise can involve complex issues of an economic and geopolitical order, but one of the main ones is undoubtedly the strategic interest in transforming its territory into a privileged pole for the installation of data centers, factories software, global e-commerce companies and all kinds of investments in the web economy.
Like the tax haven, cyber haven offers the digital business operator an excellent trench to defend against "cumbersome" legislation. While the tax haven provides so-called tax dumping, cyber haven offers a true legal blackout, freeing website and business owners from the digital world from having to bow to restrictions, often considered harmful to business. The other irresistible offer, within the scope of the digital refuge, is the extreme point of this blackout: it is anonymity guaranteed for actions taken on the web, which reinforces the anti-judicial safeguards that are in the spirit of the thing.
Described in this way, these two visions of paradise (tax and cybernetics), already raise serious doubts about the windows of opportunity that both open to crime or unfair business practices.
For one and the other, however, there are also favorable arguments that, in the case of tax havens, are often associated with individual freedom, the "sacred" right to self-protection of property and financial privacy, as well as the "legitimate" right that capital private sector must protect itself against the tax voracity of the State.
In the case of cyber havens, they are almost always justified on the grounds of countries' sovereignty and development. Mauritius, for example, a small country in Africa with an economy anchored in sugar cane, tourism and tobacco, started a decade ago to attract companies from the digital world by offering aggressive tax benefits associated with quite a lot of legislation. liberal. With this, the country achieved some important leaps that, in the end, contributed to that the Mauritius Islands today have one of the best HDIs in Africa.
For cyber havens, another favorable argument lies in the service they provide to the struggle for internet freedom by citizens who live under dictatorships and use these refuges as protected sites for an activism that, after all, is viewed very favorably by the global community. of a democratic nature.
However, truth be told, the existence of cyber havens is a much more significant threat to global security than financial havens are to the economy. First, because the financial world has already learned to keep its havens within limits considered to be operationally reasonable. Recent examples, moreover, attest that the anonymity of tax havens has often been broken when there is sufficient evidence of a list of heinous crimes involving offshore accounts.
But as for cyber haven, the situation continues - at least apparently - without any sign of control. And it is not just terrorists, organized crime gangs, pedophiles or drug dealers who rank among the threats anchored in these outlaw screens.
There are cases of thousands of e-commerce companies that transfer their institutional base to such places and thus get rid of inconveniences, for example, such as the Brazilian consumer code and or the more advanced standards of protection of individual data against abuse of data. invasive e-marketing and registration commercialization practices.
The challenges of facing these contradictions of the law are still far from being solved, and the proof of this is the slowness with which the still small number of nations adhere to the Convention on Cyber Crimes of 2001 (also known as the Budapest Convention), although it is this is the oldest and most widespread legal framework on the subject.
The situation leads us to think about that kind of limbo to which the layered overlay of the great global network refers, in which the internet that we use on a daily basis is only the "surface web", which gives rise to the existence of a " Deep Internet ", a space that is not strictly indexed and almost out of legal control. As with the "deep web", against which there is little to do, the existence of cyber havens is being assimilated as a fact of reality. A "natural" reality, with which people, national states and companies will need to live, using, if necessary, the instruments of self-defense that are within their reach.
Among such instruments, it is often observed the application of the old precept of justice of the talion ("eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth"). In recent times, a Malaysian provider has refused to disclose the identity of criminals who maintained a racist website and made death threats against students in Brasília. Without support from institutions in that country, the Brazilian Federal Police had access to wiretaps made on international routers that led to the rapid identification and arrest of those involved. Was this an investigation anchored by international law? Well, what we do know is that the Malaysian court - or its central government - has not issued any kind of protest.
There are cases, however, when the situation is more difficult. From a website in Tokelau, an island in Polynesia, Brazilian fraudsters cloned the portal of the Court of Justice of RS and sent messages to thousands of widow pensioners with the collection of false fees. For using the deep Internet to control their operations (and, therefore, without leaving the fingerprints of their IP to access the site), such criminals remain unidentified and the only possible measure is protection, at least until the writing of this article.
It is possible that cyber havens can only have full control, on reasonable grounds, as a result of the intensification of the so-called digital war and a greater commitment by the great powers to impose a global regulation that prevents the anonymity of criminals and speeds up investigations, in dealing with crimes committed in cyberspace.
While this does not happen, good advice for the citizen is the utmost care when establishing digital transactions with brands and senders of strangers. Checking the origin of the sites (including with search engine search) is an essential care. Another precautionary measure - this one is much more difficult to follow - is to read the terms of subscription to digital services, whether paid or free, with the utmost attention. By clicking "accepted" or "advance", without the annoying reading of these terms, the user is often authorizing his registration data to become public, or to gently integrate the collection of information that this site will sell or use, exclusively, the legal frameworks of the host country, often a tax haven.
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