Glenn Greenwald: Why Did Brazil Ban X?
Glenn Greenwald discusses Brazil's ban of X, the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and the global crackdown on speech on Just Asking Questions.
Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X?
Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked the site formerly known as Twitter in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban on X with a VPN could get you fined about $9,000 a day, around the average per capita income in Brazil. It happened after Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state had accused of being part of "digital militias" undermining Brazil's democracy.
X's owner Elon Musk has accused the judge of "repeatedly and brazenly" betraying Brazil's constitution, called for his impeachment, and described him as "Brazil's Darth Vader."
The judge has accused Musk of "criminal instrumentalization" of the X platform and frozen the assets of Musk's satellite internet company Starlink in the country.
Joining us today from Brazil to talk about all this, and the intensifying global crackdown on online speech, is Glenn Greenwald. His show System Update airs every weeknight at 7 p.m. ET on Rumble. An archive of all his latest work is available on his Substack.
Sources referenced in the conversation:
- Elon Musk on X casting shame on Judge de Moraes
- 2022 Brazilian election results—Resultados – TSE
- Judge de Moraes' social media order—https://t.co/YjD9gK3ck0
- Encryption in France—ATICA European Association of Trade + Investment Controls and Compliance Attorneys
- Thierry Breton letter to Elon Musk ahead of of Aug. 2024 X livestream with Trump: https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1823033048109367549
- "What Really Happened in Venezuela's Election?" Just Asking Questions
Chapters:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:50 How Brazil's 2022 election shapes things today
- 11:48 Does Brazil have any separation of powers?
- 16:50 Is Glenn Greenwald fleeing Brazil?
- 19:54 de Moraes is breaking Brazilian law
- 26:34 Brazil is persecuting Starlink, too
- 31:09 Brazil's restrictions on VPNs
- 34:27 Venezuela's Maduro, leftists, and free speech
- 37:45 How should democracy's handle fraud?
- 42:45 The EU mimics Brazil's speech restrictions
- 47:40 France's arrest of Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov
- 52:26 Defending Section 230 and encryption
- 1:02:14 What is motivating these global crackdowns?
Abbreviated Transcript:
Zach Weissmueller: Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X.com, Just Asking Questions. I'm Weissmueller, senior producer for Reason, joined by my co-host, Wolfe, Reason associate editor and author of The Reason Roundup. Hey Liz.
Liz Wolfe: Hey, Zach.
Weissmueller: Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked X, formerly known as Twitter, in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban with a virtual private network (VPN) could get you fined about $9,000 dollars a day, which is around the average annual income per capita in Brazil. It happened after X's owner Elon Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state has accused of being part of digital militias undermining Brazil's democracy. Musk has accused the judge of repeatedly and brazenly betraying Brazil's constitution, called for his impeachment and described him as Brazil's Darth Vader. The judge has accused Musk of criminal instrumentalization of the X platform and frozen the assets of Musk's satellite internet company Starlink in the country. Joining us today from Brazil to talk about all this and the intensifying global crackdown on online speech is Greenwald. He's a man who needs no introduction to our audience. I'll just say that you can see a show system update every weeknight at 7 p.m. EST on Rumble and see an archive of all his latest work on his Substack. Glenn, thank you for coming on the show.
Glenn Greenwald: Thanks for having me. Great to be with you guys.
Weissmueller: I thought that in order to better understand why this judge has picked a fight with X and Elon Musk, or maybe it's the other way around, it'd be helpful for you to give your take on the tumultuous political events in Brazil that have led to this moment, starting with Jair Bolsonaro losing the presidential election by a fairly narrow margin to Lula de Silva. We've cut together a little montage that features a couple of soundbites from Bolsonaro, these soundbites as we do on this show because we have audio listeners. I've been translated and dubbed using AI from Portuguese to English, but there's some soundbites of Bolsonaro sowing doubts about Brazil's election integrity in the lead up to the vote. And then some footage from January when his supporters breached several government buildings, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Presidential Palace, claiming that the election was fraudulent. Let's roll that to get into this conversation.
Video Clip: "Our system is unauditable. It is not possible to prove whether or not there was fraud in the elections. This system here makes it impossible to establish any relationship or correlation between the voter and their vote. There's the storming of the building, big crowd gathering outside, the overturned tables."
Weissmueller: Obviously Americans will be inclined to draw some parallels to our own situation in 2020 in our minds. But just taking Brazil on its own terms, how do we get from the events of 2022 to an outright ban of a huge platform like X?
Greenwald: Yes, I think the setup explicated very well the key point, which is in many ways what's happening in Brazil is simply a reflection of broader trends both in the West and Western Europe, but also in Canada and the United States, the U.K., this sense that I think emerged primarily after 2016, that western elites can no longer permit a free internet. Because when you allow a free internet, their media outlets cannot monopolize discourse any longer. The propaganda system becomes weakened. I think they were particularly traumatized by the dual events of the U.K. voting to leave the E.U. through the ratification of Brexit followed only three months later by the greatest trauma of the lives of the Western liberal, which is the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. You can really see immediately following that, the emergence of this new industry called anti disinformation funded by all sorts of western liberal billionaires, the same small handful that fund the projects to censor the internet in the name of Russian influence as well.
This whole industry popped up based on this idea that we can no longer allow an internet to be free because when we do, we get these forces that are directly threatening to the establishment. So if you print anything in Brazil, just go back a little bit from where you began, which was in 2018 when Jair Bolsonaro decided to run for president, nobody took Jair Bolsonaro seriously. He was sort of like, I don't know, the Matt Gage or the Marjorie Taylor Greene of Brazilian politics. He had been a member of Congress for 30 years. He drew a lot of media attention through these outlandish statements that were often very anti-democratic, but he was very good, very charismatic at bringing a lot of attention to himself, but he was always on the fringes of political life. The anti-establishment, anti status quo sentiment in Brazil grew so much that he was able to channel that by presenting himself as the enemy of the establishment.
Very similar to what Trump did that a lot of Western European populist parties are doing. And out of nowhere became president of Brazil. He won by a fairly large margin over the Workers party, which had been Lula de Silva's party that had pretty much dominated Brazilian politics and ruled Brazil since 2002. A lot of what started happening in Brazil in terms of free speech, just like in the United States and Western Europe, was a reaction to a very aggressively anti-establishment movement that had a right-wing populist strain to it, a pretty dominant right-wing populist strain. They were petrified of it because it was absolutely a threat to status quo establishment ruling power. I was somebody who thought that Jair Bolsonaro was incredibly dangerous to Brazilian democracy. I was saying that all the way up until the election.
But after the election, it was very clear that Brazilian institutions were a lot stronger than people thought, were able to make Jair Bolsonaro a very weak candidate, just like I think American institutions made Trump a very weak candidate, really limited what he was able to do versus the sort of stuff he was saying. Very quickly into Bolsonaro's administration, they created through the Supreme Court a criminal investigation called criminal investigation into fake news. It empowered this one single judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who is not a leftist. In fact, he was appointed by this center-right president who preceded Bolsonaro, who became president when they impeached [former President] Dilma Rousseff, who was the left-wing part of Lula's presidency. The entire Brazilian left thought that this was a coup.
They thought that Alexandre de Moraes was this fascist, they called him a fascist, a racist, a white nationalist. All the things that the left calls people and they dislike him. He was very much not a man of the left, but he was kind of a sort of [Senate Minority] Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) figure, very center-right or right-wing, but very pro-establishment. He was very powerful. He was connected to a lot… he was a lawyer. He used to defend a lot of very powerful criminal gangs and the like. Very well-connected to police and the armed agencies. They empowered him to essentially start single-handedly policing the internet to just order people banned from the internet, hosts removed from the internet with a very powerful fine structure and punishment structure for big tech if they failed to do so very quickly within two hours of the order being issued.
It became this censorship mania, as you probably know very well, that when human beings get this censorship power, it's very intoxicating, it's very inebriating, it's incredible power. They were able to start building this idea that the only thing that could save Brazilian democracy was censorship. It just kept growing and growing and growing over the years, Alexandre de Moraes was transformed into the most admired national hero by the Brazilian left. That was just four years earlier, calling him a fascist and a racist and all of that because he was imprisoning, not only censoring, but then began imprisoning their political enemies with no due process. Just through a stroke of a pen became the most powerful judge you can think of in any country in the democratic world anywhere. So with all that adoration and all that encouragement, his power grew.
He had, I think it was a very authoritarian mindset, and he started issuing so many censorship orders that, for example, Rumble, the platform where I have my show on, decided that they could no longer be in Brazil just because they couldn't and wouldn't comply with the avalanche of censorship orders. I'm talking about how they would censor and order removed from the internet elected members of Congress, some of the people with the highest vote total. In the name of democracy, they were kicking off the internet through a stroke of a judge's pen, no trial, no due process, nothing. People who got the biggest votes among the Brazilian people to represent them in the Congress. Rumble is already out of Brazil. If I want to watch my own show when I'm in Brazil or we have to transmit it on Rumble, we have to use a VPN because there's no way to access Rumble in Brazil because of this.
Elon got to that same point where X every day was being ordered to censor hundreds and then thousands, not just again of random citizens spreading hate speech anonymously, but prominent elected members of the Brazilian Congress and others. Elon got to the point where he said, "We're not going to comply with this unjust, coercive censorship scheme that itself is illegal." It is for reasons that I could explain, but it has no legal basis. So this judge said when X started not complying with some of these orders, they threatened to arrest the executives of X physically present in Brazil. To protect X employees, Elon closed X's offices in Brazil, so there were no more people they could imprison and then also continue to allow those posts and people to remain on social media. And so Alexandre de Moraes said, "Either within 48 hours you remove every post I've ordered, taken down, and you appoint a Brazilian representative on Brazilian soil to represent X."
Who in their right mind would do that except somebody already serving a life sentence of prison given the threats to imprison him or we're going to ban X from Brazil. When Elon didn't comply, this judge issued not only an order banning X from all of Brazil, and it's now completely unavailable and inaccessible in Brazil unless you use a VPN. He also invented a law. How does a judge invent the law that says it is now illegal to use a VPN to access X, and anyone who does pays the fine that you reference, which is an exorbitant fine from any perspective, $10,000 a day. But from a Brazilian perspective, they're like, "There's 1 percent of the population that could pay that for even a single day." It just shows how extreme I think Brazilian culture is in terms of its abandonment of any belief in free speech. But I think also you see a lot of support for it in the broader West, which may not have gone as far yet as Brazil has gone, but is very much on that same path.
Wolfe: I think all three of us agree that Moraes action was horrifying, right? This sets a terrible precedent, but Glenn, I'm curious about whether you could walk us through what implications this has for separation of powers in Brazil and for rule of law. This strikes me as a huge possible turning point.
Greenwald: It's interesting because when Brazil redemocratized in 1985 and then enacted this constitution in 1989, they wrote this constitution that actually is more robust in its protections than the American constitution on which it in part was modeled. It's a very extensive constitution, but it's very much based on the idea of separation of powers, a balance of power between three branches, the congressional, the judicial, and the executive. The Supreme Court had always been the weakest, the most obscure of the three branches. They just kind of issued technical rulings about the law. But then once the emergence of Bolsonaro happened, all the rules went out the window. Similar to how in the United States, every media outlet changed their ethos, every institution changed how they began functioning with the single-minded goal of stopping Trump. The idea became that, "Look, we have to amass every power we can amass to destroy the Bolsonaro movement, to imprison the leaders, to prevent it from succeeding." And the Supreme Court started to become the most dominant force in the country by far.
They often just legislate overtly from the bench like, "Should marijuana be illegal? Should it be illegal? At what point should abortion should be allowed? Should it be criminalized?" They constantly issue laws that the Congress is starting to get very angry about in terms of the invasion of their authority. The problem is, and it's very hard to explain Brazil to people, but Brazil is a very transactional country politically. The dominant force in Congress are neither left or right. They're these kind of transactional centrists, and as long as their wheels are being greased, they will side with whoever is in power. So Moraes and the Supreme Court have done a good job of neutralizing the Congress. You have angry people in Congress, but that doesn't form a majority. There's a drive to impeach Moraes because he's such a tyrant and exceeding all bounds, but they can't get a majority because the majority of people in Congress are getting what they really want, which are these transactional benefits. They're very much financially driven parties. They'll align with anybody right or left, whoever benefits their immediate interest.
Wolfe: So there's no safeguard on Moraes' power? There's no means of reining it in at this point?
Greenwald: I'll just give you a quick example. About a month and a half ago, we obtained a massive archive of documents from the highest level of Moraes chambers, the WhatsApp conversations of his aides, audios, documents. I was able to get this, and they partnered with the largest newspaper in Brazil, which is Folha de S.Paulo, where I'm a columnist. I've worked with them before. It's like The New York Times of Brazil—the biggest, most mainstream media outlet. Obviously when you go around publishing people's private secrets in a way that makes them look bad, as our reporting was doing, they get pretty angry. I've seen that before in my reporting. Never though, have I seen before the opening by the judge who's the subject of the reporting a criminal investigation that not only named the people they suspect having leaked this information, but also me, the reporters through my work and Folha itself as part of this broad, endless fake news investigation.
There were rumors that the police were going to come to our house, do searches and seizures to find out who our sources are, even though those constitutional protections guarantee sources. None of that has happened yet, although there have been some formal steps taken to make it possible. But I know for sure that if it happened, the number of people willing to raise their voice in objection would be nowhere near sufficient to make it stop. There are no limits on his power, none, zero. And it's because he's neutralized the center and become a hero to the left. The only people who protest him are Bolsonaro's, people who support Bolsonaro, who are otherwise from the right. It's made as though the only way you can defend free speech in Brazil, the only way you can criticize the accesses of Alexandre de Moraes is if you basically declare yourself to be some far right in the words of a Brazilian mainstream society, a fascist.
On one other thing, I know a lot of lawyers, a lot of judges, and a lot of people who work in Brazil, the legal system for a lot of different reasons. I've been reporting here, I've been living here a long time. My husband was a member of Congress. There are so many of them who will tell you that the majority of people in that world of legalism and law professors and the judiciary are petrified of how far he's gone. But when you try and get them to go on the record, you won't get any of them on the record because people are petrified of this judge. That to me is the hallmark of the fact that you're living in a tyranny, that people are afraid to criticize a person who exercises political and public power. And that's very much the pervasive sentiment here.
Weissmueller: I'm curious, where do you fit in here? Because you were facing the same situation under Bolsonaro. You had obtained messages that showed that a judge was engaged in corruption in the Lula case, the case that ended up sending the current president, then the former president to prison, and that upset the Bolsonaro administration and you became a target of them. And now you're finding yourself in a similar situation with the opposite side of the political spectrum. It seems like you're kind of in a no man's land. How much longer are you sticking around in Brazil, Glenn?
Greenwald: I have a lot of new friends who were once my enemies very recently, and a lot of new enemies who had been keeping me with the greatest praise just a few years ago because the reporting we did in 2019 and 2020 is what enabled. When Bolsonaro ran for office in 2018, people assumed that his primary opponent was going to be Lula and that was the big obstacle. But this corruption force ended up convicting Lula and he went to prison and our reporting was able to show that the judge sent him to prison. The prosecutors had been engaging in all sorts of corruption. They had been conspiring against him in secret, and it forced the Supreme Court to nullify Lula's conviction. It's what let Lula out of prison.
He had been sentenced to a 11-year term, and then that enabled him to run for president against Bolsonaro in 2022, probably the only person who had any chance of beating Bolsonaro, and he won by a small margin. At the time, I was public enemy number one of the Bolsonaro movement. They criminally indicted me. The judge ended up throwing it out for a kind of coincidental reason, but also my husband was a very prominent member in Congress of a left-wing party, and we were a gay couple in a country that still has difficulty with that. A lot of threats came from the Bolsonaro issues, but on the other hand, the Brazilian left could not have loved us more, and now all it took for that to reverse was for me to start in the beginning saying the censorship is going way too far, values of free speech matter to any democracy.
Because the people being censored were almost entirely on the right, it immediately alienated the left, started having not just myself, but my husband looked at as this sort of enemy, this traitor to their cause. It also started making the Bolsonaro's sort of having this strange new respect and then that led to a lot of other critiques of Moraes. But I was willing to take the lead in voicing using the protections that I have and my platform. The reporting that we did has unleashed that completely. But no, my kids are Brazilian. They were born in Brazil. They lived their whole life in Brazil. They're 15 and 16. I have no intention of leaving, but there definitely are threats and risks, but I think that's true of any journalist doing the right job, journalism.
Weissmueller: I would like to get you to weigh in on the legal question here. I've pulled a little bit of Moraes order, which I translated just using Google Translate. We link this, we link all our materials in the description, so if anyone wants to get to the original material, it's there. But essentially on this page, Moraes says, "Social media is not a lawless land. Providers of social networks and private messaging services must absolutely respect the federal constitution, the law, and the jurisdiction of Brazil. Criminal instrumentalization of social media providers and private messaging services for the broadest practice of criminal activities on social media, including attacks on the regime could constitute civil and criminal participation in the conduct investigated."
Then in this other section over here, he's specifically naming Elon Musk and accusing him of intentional criminal instrumentalization saying, "X shall refrain from disobeying any of the court orders already issued, including reactivating profiles who we said need to be deactivated under penalty of a daily fine of 100,000 Brazilian Reals." What's your reaction to the legal rationale the judges laid out here, specifically his decision to single out Elon Musk as someone who's criminally instrumentalizing his platform to threaten Brazilian democracy?
Greenwald: I think in theory, we can all agree that a country has the right to a sovereign country, to establish laws. Then say that, "If you are a foreign corporation wanting to do business in our country, you have to comply with our laws. If you don't, you can't do business here." In theory, that's a perfectly reasonable, universal view of every sovereign government, probably a hallmark of sovereignty is the ability to do that. The problem becomes what if the actions of the state that they're ordering are extremely unjust? For example, if the Chinese make a certain religion illegal, will people say, "Oh, I think anyone who's expressing those religious views that have been made illegal by the Chinese government should be banned from all social media on the grounds that we have to abide by the dictates of Chinese law."
What if a politician in the United States or a judge says, "Anybody praising Donald Trump shall be immediately removed from the internet." Even though that may have the pretext of legal authority, does anyone actually believe that that's something that we would want a big tech company to do? There's always this notion that things that the state orders can have a legal basis, but they can also be abusive and illegal. And that's the case here. Again, I mean it sort of takes a little bit of technical knowledge that might be a little bit boring for me to really explain, but judges don't have this power to just order people banned who have been accused of nothing. This is the thing is we got our hands on a secret order. I think it was the first one that we ever were able to publish from Moraes back in early 2023 where he ordered banned from every platform. He sent it to Facebook, Google, then Twitter, Rumble, Telegram, everyone, and he had a list of people.
He said, "These people are hereby banned." Among those people were elected, senators elect members of the Congress. The most popular podcaster in Brazil is sort of the Joe Rogan of Brazil, just banished from the internet. When we got this order and we contacted those who were ordered banned, none of them had known, none of them were advised of this order, let alone in the order itself. No explanation was given as far as what it is that they were alleged to have done wrong that justified the banning. Obviously there was no process that was permitted for them to go in and contest the justifiability of the rulings. These are acts of pure tyranny in their most extreme form, and that's why Rumble got to the point and they said, even though Brazil is a gigantic country, the fifth most populous country on the planet, very, very online country of a lot of young people, Rumble said, "It's not worth this anymore for whatever benefits we can get Brazil because we don't want to be complying with this constant unjust censorship scheme."
That was the point that Elon Musk reached as well. It'd be one thing if the Congress enacted some sort of broad-based social media law that said, "Anything that we determined to be hate speech or that we determined to be misinformation, the platforms have an obligation to remove, and if they don't here are the penalties." The Congress tried to introduce a law like that and it failed. They couldn't get a majority of votes. In fact, one of the few times the establishment turned against Moraes was when that law was pending and it looked like it might pass, Facebook and Google began lobbying against the law. They began using their platforms. Like if you were in Brazil and you accessed Facebook or any Google platform, there'd be a kind of box that said, "Call your member of Congress and urge them to vote no on this law because it'll restrict your free speech."
When Alexandre de Moraes—again, just a single judge on the Supreme Court saw that Facebook and Google was doing that—ordered the federal police, the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI, to summon the executives of Google and Facebook to the headquarters of the federal police to be questioned and made them part of this criminal inquiry. The same thing happened the way that, as I said before, when we started doing our reporting, we were immediately included in this criminal fake news investigation. Because the mindset of this judge, like so many leaders around the world, is that any criticism of this judge, any suggestion or argument that he's exercising power illegitimately or tyrannically is not just misguided or unfair or wrong.
It is an attack on the legitimacy of Brazilian institutions and therefore intended to weaken, if not overturn, Brazilian democracy itself. That's how we characterized the reporting that we began doing, which was this is fake news that is designed to weaken the legitimacy of Brazilian institutions and therefore overturn Brazilian democracy itself, which is a crime if you try to do those things. That's how he characterizes anything that's critical of him. You're faced with real tyranny, real authoritarianism. Again, in theory I think companies should probably comply with duly enacted laws of countries, but when it becomes an abuse of power, not an expression of legitimate power, I think they're acting more ethically when they refuse to comply.
Wolfe: What's the role of Starlink in all of this? That's a component that I'm kind of fascinated by because it seems like just a few years ago when Starlink, another Elon Musk company, was introduced to Brazil and a means of getting far more people internet access than they had before. He was celebrated as a hero. Now I know that Moraes attempted to freeze the assets of Starlink as a means of basically exerting pressure on Musk. And there's been a little bit of back and forth between Moraes and Starlink as to, I think the latest update was that Starlink has now said that it's going to comply.
I think Zach and I both come from this from a perspective of information wants to be free. Maybe the future is Starlink everywhere and pervasive VPN usage. Maybe every 10-year-old learns how to download a VPN and figure out how to use it. If we can't have a free internet and we have these authoritarian busy bodies attempting to control everything all the time, well maybe we have means of thwarting it and that's going to be necessary. But it seems like Starlink
has played a huge role in this so far.
Greenwald: It's so interesting because in 2022, just a couple years ago, governors and members of Congress and part of the presidency were showering Elon Musk with all sorts of awards and honors and commendations because one of the things that he was doing was enabling free internet for some of the poorest and most remote parts of Brazil, not just people in the Amazon who you could never have reached before, but who now have internet access thanks to free Starlink, but also some of the Brazil is a country plagued by brutal income inequality and wealth inequality and therefore opportunity inequality. I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands, maybe a couple million, young people who wouldn't have access in their schools or their homes to the internet now have that free courtesy of Starlink.
Yet obviously Starlink is part of SpaceX and is a for-profit enterprise. They also provide satellite-based internet connection to the Brazilian military, to a lot of Brazilian institutions. Brazil relies on Starlink a lot more than Starlink needs Brazil. One of the extraordinary things that Moraes did as a way of trying to enforce or punish X was they didn't just try and freeze the bank accounts of X, but also of a completely different company of Starlink that has, yes, Musk is a major shareholder in each, but they're completely different companies. They have totally different shareholders, major shareholders that are in one and not the other.
Wolfe: How is that legal?
Greenwald: It's not, no one thinks it's legal, and even there.
Wolfe: Because I'm struggling to follow the connective tissue, I'm struggling to figure out the legal principle that could be at play, but you're saying it's invented, Moraes has concocted it.
Greenwald: One of the things that they were complaining about was that because Starlink is controlled by Musk and offers internet service, they needed Starlink, every other internet provider to agree to block X. Originally Starlink said, "We're not going to block X in Brazil. Why would we? We don't think it's just." And so originally part of the allegation against Starlink was, "We're refreezing your accounts because of your refusal to comply." But a day or two later, probably because of pressure from SpaceX's shareholders, they reversed and Starlink said, "Okay, we'll comply with the order. We'll also ban X from Brazil through our internet services." But they still have unfrozen their bank accounts because it's just a punitive effort to punish Elon Musk and to force him to bend the knee by freezing…they froze all bank accounts in Brazil of a completely separate company. This is what I'm trying to convey that's hard to convey is, and you asked this earlier Liz, which is are there any limits on what Moraes can do?
No. No, there are not. Again, you'll see now some newspapers saying he's going too far. Even a couple members of the court said, "We agree with the banning of X, but not the freezing of Starlink." Because you can't be a country that is open to foreign investment and other corporations if you have these arbitrary rules where your bank accounts can be frozen any time without even being accused of, let alone proven guilty, of any crime. People are starting to become very concerned about the instability in the alienation this provides. There are only eight countries on earth that ban X, Turkmenistan and Iran and Russia and China and post-coup Pakistan and Venezuela, and now Brazil, which has always thought of itself crucially as part of the democratic world, not part of the undemocratic world. You're seeing this international perception of Brazil starting to change in that it worries Brazilian elites a lot more than any of the other things Moraes has done.
Wolfe: I think one thing that comes to mind is that there are so many countries in the world where unfortunately VPN use is standard, that is the means by which people can access the free and open internet. Is Brazil becoming one of those places? Are VPNs the way of getting around this?
Greenwald: When it became a possibility that X would be banned in Brazil days earlier before it had been, I began encouraging VPN use by everybody, offering instructions, suggesting free programs to download, and a lot of other people were doing the same. I think the threat of censorship has significantly increased the use of VPNs. As I said, once Rumble became unavailable in Brazil, a lot of people who were watching Rumble shows, a lot of people who had been censored by Moraes but were allowed on Rumble were encouraging VPN usage. VPN usage is typically tools that are used by citizens of authoritarian states to access sites that the government doesn't want them to access because there's information and news and opinion and perspective there that they don't want their citizens to be able to access. That's what VPNs are for, is to circumvent tyrannical acts of the state.
To have Brazil be a country where you're basically obligated to have VPNs now if you want to be able to access a major global square, which X is. Think about it, if you're a Brazilian journalist, a lot of important things happen on X. Foreign leaders make pronouncements there, decisions get made there. There's important sources of information. It's illegal for journalists in Brazil to access X. If they report on X, they'll immediately basically be proclaiming themselves guilty of this VPN ban. The one good thing is that there are hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, I think probably millions who are continuing to use X, obviously using civil disobedience to defy this VPN order. I wonder who the first test case is going to be that Moraes singles out in order to try and say, "Oh, you've been using," I hope it's me. I don't think it will be because I hope it is, but he's going to have to enforce it at some point given the just utterly widespread defiance of his order.
Weissmueller: And just to be clear, we are streaming this live right now on X. The recorded episode that you're watching on YouTube right now obviously is not live, but I'm hoping this will not be the test case that leads them to bring down the hammer on you Glenn. But Elon Musk seems to not only have a target on his back in Brazil, but across the world. You mentioned that Brazil unfortunately has joined this list of countries like Venezuela that have gone down this authoritarian path. Recently the newly elected president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro, who declared victory in an election that looks much more… I'd say there's much more evidence of fraud than in the Brazilian election. International observers, including the U.S. and E.U. have said it's fraudulent. So take that for what it's worth. But we covered that election in a previous episode that we'll link below, but I want to play a clip of Maduro calling out both Musk and Argentine President Javier Milei, which like our previous clips has been dubbed into English and re-synced by HeyGen AI, and get your reaction to this. Could you roll that, John?
Video Clip: "They told me exactly what to do with the devil, with the diabolical symbols that Elon Musk handles. Look at his profile and the diabolical symbols he has on his chest. They are satanic cults of power in the United States that have organized sex like the one in Orlemeny or in Venezuela Satanic sex like this fascism that has attacked the country. It is a spiritual struggle between good and evil, between hatred, lies, deceit and Fascism because you know all the occultism that was behind Hitler, you sinned."
Weissmueller: Not only is Musk a threat to his regime, but he's actually demonic according to Maduro. One thing I just find curious about this situation is that so much of the heat on Musk and X right now is coming from leftist regimes and also you might say the center-left technocrats, which we can talk more about a little bit later, but just lingering on it coming from people like Maduro or the Lula regime, although as you've made it clear, it's really this judge who has ties to a different regime. What do you make of that political constellation, Glenn?
Greenwald: Tto be clear, I personally don't think there's a lot of evidence of fraud in the 2022 Brazilian election where Lula defeated Bolsonaro. Just like I don't think there's a lot of evidence of fraud in the 2020 election where Biden defeated Trump. There's probably more in Venezuela, but I do think it's very interesting the rules of discourse about when you're permitted to a large election fraud and when you're not. I remember very well in 2018 when, even [Evo] Morales, a very popular leader ran for his fourth term as president of Bolivia, and he was at the eight or 9 percent lead point, a little bit below where you need 10 percent in order to avoid a runoff. And all these pro-Morales votes came in at the last minute put them over the top, very similar to what happened with Biden in 2020 that Trump used to allege fraud.
The West said, "Oh, that's proof of fraud." All these Morales votes came in. In reality, what the west even admits now, is Morales' votes always came in at the end because his strongholds are rural areas, indigenous areas that come in late. It's a very similar situation where it's almost illegal to say that about the American election, the Brazilian election, but you can say that freely about the Bolivian election even if it turned out to be true. That's how free speech and censorship are wielded as weapons. There's no consistency to it, it's whoever is using it to promote a certain interest. But I think the question you asked-
Weissmueller: Just to linger on that. As someone who holds free speech as one of your highest political values, but recognizing the reality that there are these sort of armies of, I think in Brazil they call it the digital militia, these groups that are out there trying to undermine the legitimacy of the system and invent reasons to think that there's fraud without actually ever bringing forth the hard evidence. How should government or how should a democracy handle that situation? How should they handle political movements who are sowing doubt about elections in order to perhaps enable something post-democratic?
Greenwald: I think there's a difference between whether there's a reasonable basis to question the legitimacy or the integrity of election systems versus alleging that there was active fraud that altered the results. For example, in Brazil, what the Bolsonaro movement wanted and what they were asking Congress to do, because everything's computerized to simply provide paper backups for every vote so that you could audit the totals versus the paper totals. Because the Congress was so afraid of validating the concerns he was raising about the possibility of election fraud, which they thought they would do if they voted for paper ballots, they refused to. You do have a system that is obviously vulnerable to alteration whether or not it happened in this particular election, and you have to be able to raise that. Same in the U.S., in Brazil you have a country of similar voting population to the U.S. that everybody goes and votes.
The full complete election results are known and certified within five hours after the polls closed on the same day. In the U.S. it takes three weeks or six weeks or eight weeks to count votes. Like the idea that we can't count as efficiently as Brazil, a country not exactly known for its efficiency, of course raises legitimate questions about whether there's tampering going on in the elections. Of course, that has to be something that citizens can legitimately raise, but even if they're alleging fraud and there's no basis for it, we don't have ministries of truth. We don't have centers of government that say, "Oh, this is false. This is true." Because as we see with Alexandre de Moraes, they will use that power for their own interest to shield them from questioning or criticism of the dogma that they want to advance. There may be harm to allowing false ideas to circulate, but the harm of allowing the state to regulate it is far, far greater.
That's a foundational view of our own country. But just on the issue of Musk, I thought it was completely predictable and there were a lot of people at the time predicting that if he really followed through on the claims and promises he was making when he decided to buy Twitter, namely that I'm going to eliminate the censorship regime. I'm not going to comply with censorship demands. I'm going to pursue a view of absolutist free speech, whereas as long as speech is not illegal, it is permitted. I'm not going to censor for ideological offense or false ideas. It was completely clear and obvious and predictable that he, no matter how much power he had, was going to be the target of major attacks given what we started off talking about, which is the central importance now to Western institutions and centers of power of controlling the internet and of being able to exercise the power to remove people and ideas from the internet that is central to their perception of survival as a ruling class.
I always knew that that was going to happen, that Elon's other companies were going to be attacked, that they would attack X. There are now open investigations in the E.U. of a criminal nature and they're being very cynical about it. One of the allegations is that X allowed too much anti-Israel speech after October 7, too much disinformation about Israel to sort of try and lure the right to support what is in fact the kind of liberal or establishment cause of censorship. But there are down there, you do you have European countries now saying that it's possible that if X doesn't comply more robustly with our new Digital Services Act law that we might ban X in our country too. Because I think this is the important thing is even though Brazil is a couple steps forward, everyone's watching Brazil as a laboratory.
The people who have been instituting this censorship regime in Brazil, who have been advocating for it, who are the architects of it constantly go to Amsterdam and Berlin and Paris and Madrid, and they have these conferences in the E.U. about how to combat disinformation online. The Brazilians go and say, "Here's what we're doing." Everyone in the E.U., these Brussels bureaucrats are taking very robust notes about how they can copy it. That's why I think there's a tendency to say, "Oh, Brazil is one of those Third World countries." Brazil is very much part of the democratic world. It's an advanced economy, it's one of the top 10 economies in the world, and it is not disconnected from the rest of the world. We're not talking about say Mongolia and, "Oh, who cares what happens in Mongolia." This is very much a laboratory for how these sorts of structures can be imposed.
Weissmueller: Speaking of the E.U., this is Thierry Breton, who is E.U.'s Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union. Basically he seems to have become the E.U.'s face of online censorship, and this is him threatening Elon Musk ahead of his August livestream with Trump on X. He says, "With great audience comes greater responsibility, and by posting this conversation with Trump on X, there's a risk of amplifying potentially harmful content in the E.U." He references this letter that he sent to them where he says, "I'm writing to you in the context of recent events in the U.K. and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform, you have a legal obligation to ensure X's compliance with E.U. law.
This notably means ensuring on one hand that freedom of expression of information and on the other that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence or certain instances of disinformation." So you're saying, Glenn, that the E.U. is taking notes on what Brazil's doing and incorporating that into their own guidance. But it really is next level because the E.U. in the past has been really influential in shaping global internet policy. So what do you think about this kind of saber-rattling we see from Breton pretends for free speech worldwide?
Greenwald: The E.U. is very far down this road. The other country where Rumble is unavailable is France, and the reason for that is at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The E.U. made it illegal for any social media company or service provider to platform Russia Today (RT), Sputnik or any other Russian state media. If you're an adult citizen of the E.U. and you want to hear what the Russian government is saying about this war that your country has involved you in to a great extent, you're barred from hearing it. You're not allowed to. There's no one that's allowed anymore to even allow people to hear RT. And when Rumble refused and said, "We're not going to censor RT just because you, the French government tell us to." The way Google did, they immediately removed RT from YouTube.
The French threatened to ban Rumble at the I.P. level, and now as a result, Rumble is unavailable in France as well. So you're absolutely right. The E.U. is not very far behind Brazil, and I know we're going to talk about this in a second, but the decision by the French government to lure the Telegram founder Pavel Durov to French territory, then arrest him and charge him with multiple felonies happened just a few days before Brazil banned X. I think every time one country goes a little bit further down the censorship road, it incentivizes and gives the green light to other countries to go further down. That was one of the reasons why Brazil felt confident enough to ban X was that they just watched France arrest [the] Telegram [founder]. Brazil has had its own wars with Telegram over their refusal to censor, their inability to serve them with censorship orders.
Today, Breton is this sort of censorship extremists. Even the E.U. has kind of distanced themselves a little bit from him, but he still occupies this important office in Brussels and they have been threatening X primarily, using Elon as this demon to get their hooks into real censorship over the internet even more than they already have. They've all enacted these new laws. The E.U. has this digital services act, the U.K. has this online safety act, Canada has C-11 and C-44, and other laws that are designed to give them even more censorship power. Obviously there's movements in the U.S., primarily from the Democrats to try and justify censorship of the internet and the grounds of making platforms responsible for disinformation or hate speech, which they decide at their own discretion what counts as that.
It is a very international movement and it's being fed more and more, and I find it extremely alarming because the internet is the only weapon we have left to communicate freely with one another, to not rely on major centralized corporate structures that in turn depend on appeasing the government. That was the whole promise of the internet. That's the reason why I have a career. That's the reason why I've been able to do reporting. It's the reason why a lot of people have been able to do a lot of things all around the world, and to watch it now be the target increasingly of this effort to say, "No, we have to control what can be said. We have to ban people who say things we don't want to be said." To me, it's extremely dangerous and extremely alarming.
Wolfe: Dumping on the French is one of my favorite hobbies, so it's a real thrill to be able to get to do this at work, Glenn. But I want to take us to the arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, because I think it's really interesting and I think it possibly portends something about how the Section 230 battles might play out in the United States. One of the things that we saw that I think is so interesting for those who are not aware is that the French authorities lured Durov there and then they arrested him at the airport. And the charts are so far, they're still sort of being hashed out, but some of the things that they were throwing around are kind of fascinating, right? "Telegram's lack of moderation and cooperation in the fight against pedo criminality," very much hinting at the fact that they are planning on charging him and holding him accountable for the actions facilitated by this platform.
The actions of people who are not him, and attempting to really erase some of these important distinctions that at least in the United States, we hold very dear between a platform, a host of content and the content itself and those who carry out and are inspired by that content or that speech to do criminal acts, right? We tend to crack down on the crime itself, not the mere hosting of a platform which provides the ability for people to engage in acts of commerce or acts of speech that perhaps the authorities don't like. But these distinctions between the platform and the actual crimes themselves seem to be just erased in a very widespread manner. What does the French arrest of Pavel Durov tell us about the future and the degree to which platform creators are going to be held liable for the content shared on those platforms, Glenn?
Greenwald: It's a major escalation, and I know for a fact that it has put significant amounts of fear into the hearts of billionaire tech executives who run social media platforms because things like not being able to travel to France without being arrested is a prerogative of being a billionaire tech executive. It's really a way of showing that we don't care who you are. Pavel Durov is a multi-billionaire. He founded what essentially is the Russian version of Facebook, and then fled Russia when the Russian government demanded that he hand over all sorts of data about the people in Ukraine who are fighting against the pro-Russian government and other dissidents in Russia. He refused. It was after the zone reporting that he founded Telegram with his brother, based on the need to provide end-to-end encryption and to prevent government interference. What we're seeing here is the standard authoritarian playbook.
Anytime the government wants to seize power, censorship power or anything else, they need to put a villain, a demon, some sort of fearmongering in front of the population to say, if you don't allow us to do this, we can't protect you from these scary threats. And pedophilia or sex trafficking….I remember when we were doing the Snowden reporting, part of the [National Security Agency's] excuse was, "Well, one of the things we do with these systems is we find sex traffickers and pedophiles and child pornographers." I was like, "I spent the last year of my life reading through all your documents. If one half of 1 percent of it is devoted to any of those things, that's a lot." That was the pretext, they wanted to say, "Oh, we need these systems to protect you from these scary things. That's obviously what the French are doing." The much more important threat is what you said, which is this theory. It would be like if someone plotted a murder over telephone lines and then we prosecuted AT&T executives for failure to monitor those lines, for failure to cut service off to extremists.
We said, "Because they used your service to plot these terrible crimes, you are now criminally responsible." Obviously, if you hold tech companies responsible not for the crimes they commit, but for the crimes committed by people on their platforms, what you're essentially incentivizing them to do, and this is the whole goal, is to err on the side of censorship and censor everything other than the most banal, obviously establishment pleasing sentiments. That's the whole point of that theory in Section 230 was enacted long ago based on the recognition that you could never have a free internet unless you said that tech platforms and social media companies were not responsible for the things that were posted or expressed on their platforms. Because the minute you hold them responsible for that, a free internet end, and that's what the arrest of Pavel Durov is intended to convey to all these tech executives, including Elon, I would say maybe primarily him, which is, "We don't care how rich you are, we don't care how powerful you are, we will put you in a prison cell if you don't start censoring more actively."
Wolfe: To what degree is the war on Section 230 and the war on encryption really something that's a total outcropping or an outgrowth of the misinformation, disinformation disinformation industry? What I mean by that is it's almost like we have entered into this era where instead of believing that free speech reigns above all, and it's the most important thing to secure, and it's something that citizens of a democracy can absolutely handle, and they can sit through things and decide what is true and uncover partial truths as they see fit.
Instead of that, we've veered into this very paternalistic, condescending territory where we believe that if people, what we seemingly believe, or at least the authorities do that if people have exposure to things that might possibly be untrue via a platform. Or if they have the ability to do unsavory things via a platform that we must crack down on the platform and the creators of it itself. Or that we must content moderate bad things out of sight, as opposed to believing that people can see things that they disagree with or be exposed to bad things and still manage to trudge through them. Is all of this a little bit the fault of the misinformation disinformation industry, Glenn?
Greenwald: I would say yes and no. The reason I say no is that if you go back to the mid '90s when the advent of the internet really began, when it was understood that this is going to be an important technology, think maybe [economist] Paul Krugman didn't understand it. He thought it would be as important as the fax machine, but everyone else understood how important it was. One of the very first things that happened was the Clinton administration took the attack on the Oklahoma City courthouse, which was then attributed to this menace of right-wing militias all over the country and said, "These people are going to use the internet if they can use it freely and with privacy to plot the destruction of our country." As a result, we need what was called the chipper clip or a backdoor to encryption, meaning you can lock everybody else out of these communications, but not the government. We need to have access. And the excuse was a mysterious attack.
Wolfe: By the way, that's not encryption if you can't keep the government out of it, that's fake encryption.
Greenwald: Right. If you build a backdoor that you don't lock because you want your kids to get in after school, everyone else can also use that backdoor, not just your kids, like your neighbors, thieves, anyone. And that's of course the problem with the backdoor to the internet is you build it for the government and then anyone else can use it as bad as it is even to have it for the government. But back then there was a sense that, "No, the internet is way too important to preserve as a realm of privacy." Remember, people usually use the internet anonymously. That was part of its power. People were very free to say whatever they wanted. That was part of the sort of triumphalist rhetoric around what the internet would be.
But as I said, I do think that in the United States, there is this problem that people who want to censor have, which is that all of us really are indoctrinated with the idea that free speech is the primary value. I remember one of the first articles I wrote as a journalist, was right after there, there was this a Holocaust denialist professor of history, David Irving, and he was working at a college in Austria, I believe, maybe France, maybe Austria, and he was criminally convicted and sentenced to three years in prison because of what he was saying about the Holocaust in his revisionist version of history. And I remember writing saying, "Look, Americans are very polarized politically. The right and the left think they have nothing in common."
But as Americans, I think we all pretty much recoil at the notion that you can be punished by the state for your view of history, even if it's false. It's like the one thing that we're kind of inculcated with at birth is to be an American means you have the right to say whatever you want and no one can punish you for it. I think the attempt after this trauma of 2016 of Brexit and Trump was to say, "Okay, how can we censor the internet without appearing as if we're politically censoring?" The idea was let's create a science, a sort of expertise, an apolitical, neutral expertise. Overnight there appeared these disinformation experts, like, "Where did they come from? What credential do they have to arbitrate truth and falsity?" Not in one given profession, not like a cardiologist opening the heart, these are roving arbiters of truth who suddenly call themselves disinformation experts.
The justification became, because I don't think hate speech is a very strong justification because people understand it's hard to define that. That, no, the only thing, we're not censoring dissent, we're just censoring false claims, fake news, disinformation. The people who will decide that isn't the state, it's these scholars, these experts, these people trained to identify disinformation, a completely fraudulent credential, a completely fraudulent expertise. But I think that has become the primary justification. There's been polling, you asked Americans, "Should the state or big tech have the authority or the obligation to censor the internet, to combat disinformation?" And something like three quarters of Democrats say yes, and 25 percent of Republicans say yes. It's been a very successful propagandistic campaign to depict political censorship as some sort of apolitical scientific endeavor.
Weissmueller: What disturbs me about the Telegram case in particular is the way that it seems to be going after the technical layer, the encryption layer, because that is the protection against, if we have a society turning more illiberal and more prone to censorship, then the tools of encryption are what would seem to protect against that sort of action. I've seen remarkably little commentary about this, but one aspect of the French law is actually that they require a license for cryptography. I pulled this from a trade organization which we'll link and it says, "The means of cryptology are subject to a specific control by French authorities, which require that such means of encryption should be declared or authorized before they're subject to intra-community transfers, import or export to or from France."
That is just wild to me, and it seems to be an attack on just a really fundamental aspect of online privacy. I'll give a quick shout out to one of the projects combating this, which is NOSTR, a completely decentralized protocol that has no founder for France to arrest. That's ultimately the final escape hatch as far as I'm concerned. But obviously this is something near and dear to your heart, Glenn, as someone who broke the Snowden story. What happens if countries actually start banning encryption or trying to ban encryption altogether?
Greenwald: Encryption is completely central to a free and open internet. It's the thing that prevents the NSA from being able to spy on your conversations more easily than they already can, or other governments or police agencies with no warrants or anyone who wants to harm you in any way. If you start attacking the backbone of encryption, either regulating it or banning it or making it extremely difficult to use it, unless the state approves of your use of it, probably will approve of your use of it or the type of encryption precisely because they know that you will give them access when they want it.
Then as Liz suggested earlier, if you have any access to encryption, you have universal access to encryption. There's no more protection to it the minute you build the backdoor for anybody. This is why of all the things in Brazil to that have happened, I think the most disturbing is the attempt to make it illegal to use VPNs because these are the tools that we have to keep the internet free despite the best attempts of authoritarian governments to try and control it, to try and intervene in it, to try and monitor people, to try and surveil it. When you start legislating against the use of encryption or VPNs or making them the case of France and Durov illegal, criminal. What you're essentially doing is saying that the internet will no longer be a place where you have even the most minimal amounts of privacy, the most minimal ability to evade or escape from the controls we're seeking to impose.
It will be an instrument that we control fully. There's no technological defense against our authority and our power and our capacity in order to invade it and manipulate it and control it for our own interest. And I do think, again, that's why the Durov indictment is a massive escalation because the whole theory on which it's based is that there's now this new set of legal obligations that even the most powerful tech executives in the world have to comply with. Even if they're not a citizen of France or a citizen of the country doing it, just if they're available there.
And if they don't, they could be criminally prosecuted as felons for either failing to comply with these new encryption obligations that allow the government to control it. Or even worse, being held responsible for their failure to have censored or moderated or turned over to the government, allegedly criminal activity conducted by people using their platforms, which is, as I said, a guarantor to ensure pervasive censorship. That's why the Durov thing being followed so closely by Brazil's banning of X just shows, I don't think it came out of nowhere. I think people could see it coming for a long time. It's been building and building. But these are big, big leaps by democratic world, not by governments considered, not typically authoritarian, but by the good countries as we're told in the last, that are now doing this in very aggressive ways.
Weissmueller: And you've got to wonder how that is going to manifest in the United States where we've got the First Amendment, but obviously as the 2016 to 2020 era showed, there's some workarounds to that in terms of censoring the internet or suppressing information. That's a topic we'll have to shelve for another day because I know you've got a run, Glenn. I do want to ask you the final question of the show, which is, what is a question you think more people should be asking?
Greenwald: What motive do governments have to suddenly be asserting and exerting so much concerted effort to control the flow of information on the internet? People who grew up on the internet or for whom the internet was sort of this midlife emergence always viewed the internet as the place where you can be the freest. That was the whole point of the internet. That's why the internet exists. It wasn't just to make buying airline tickets easier or to buy old used crap from people over eBay. That was sort of an ancillary benefit. The real benefit was it was a liberatory tool. It was designed to emancipate us from the constant control and coercion by centralized state and corporate power. That is what the internet more or less was for a good long time until just a few years ago.
The question I think people ought to be asking is, "What is the real motive now of trying to crack down?" Is it really that the governments that use false propaganda every day are suddenly concerned about false ideas? Is it that they somehow suddenly became so interested in ensuring that only truthful views are expressed? Or is it that they understand that free speech and the instruments that enable free speech, which basically are the internet, is the biggest threat to their ability to maintain ruling class power? I think it goes back to what we were talking about before with the idea of free speech. On the one hand, free speech, we're all taught to value it, but free speech is something that power centers will tolerate as long as it's impotent.
It's like you can get up on a cardboard box and rant and rave against the government. No one's going to come and arrest you. "Oh look, we're so free in our society, we're allowed to do that. No one in black police uniforms came and put us in a gulag." But once free speech starts to actually become impactful, once it starts to actually have the capacity to challenge and undermine establishment propaganda and orthodoxy, that's when it needs to be suppressed. I think that is what we're seeing, and I hope more people inquire and interrogate about what they think the reasons are. Because the idea that these governments are benevolently interested in suppressing false ideas, it runs counter to the way that governments have behaved since governments began. And I think it's kind of incumbent on people who value the internet to ask that question.
This interview was edited for style and clarity.
- Producer: John Osterhoudt
