John Baeyens

I’m receiving some shallow comments of Brazilians stating that the arguments of Google Inc. for not providing information of the more then 9.000 ‘criminal’ cases against Google don’t hold water.  They claim that Brazil has the same laws as the American Civil Rights Act protecting possible minorities.  Please let me know the law numbers, I’m not aware of any.  Besides this is not about protecting minorities, this is about protecting privacy.  And admitted, Brazil is not really strong on that one.  Kiddle any police under his shoulder and they’ll find your home, wife and underwear; literally.

The real argument of Google is that the supposedly 9.000 ‘criminal cases’ are not criminal.
Example: take the 68 year old maid Nelly dos Santos who appeared in the novella Paginas da Vida recently where she (of course under smart orchestration of the director Jayme Monjardim) did a nice confession on orgasms.  The poor lady of course has no clue what Youtube is, let be what Orkut is (that being said, our own maid Celia is on Orkut and has an e-mail address, even if she doesn’t have her own computer, neither Internet access; just to give an idea how powerful Orkut is as a media platform in Brazil).  She had no clue that more then 50 Orkut communities would have been created after her appearance.  And now her life is totally torn apart and she went to a lawyer.

And what does the lawyer propose: let’s sue Globo (fair, I don’t know what or what not she signed with them) and… let’s sue Google and Orkut.  Como?  Sue Google and Orkut for what?  I appeared once in a Belgium Magazine with the words ‘Money is more important then your mother’ under the picture.    I’m now the only person in Belgium who knows that I really didn’t utter those words during that interview.  And I could publish a ‘right of answer’ in the magazine.  But sue Trends for it?  Of course not.   There’s such a thing as freedom of press and freedom of speech.  Just as there is such a thing as privacy.  And those are (increasingly) important for any democracy.

What is going to happen when Leandro does a political investigation about a politician on sampaist?  Or even worse, what is going to happen when he writes a satiric article on that politician?  Right, he will be prosecuted; not the mother company of Jake Dobkin in New York but Leandro in person.   People like him ate the ones who safeguard the Brazilian democracy; not the supposedly Feds who “want to to justice”.

Anwyay, this site is hosted in the US and a Belgian company pays for it; so I can be satiric as much as I want…

And meanhwile Brazilian media feature Google as the evil dog who fails to release information on drug dealers and networks of children prostution.   The real thing is that Google is rightly trying to protect the majority of the 9.000 ‘cases’ (a boy who started a community on the above mentioned Nelly for example) to be prosecuted by the greedy narrow-minded wolfs of a Brazilian governemental system that hasn’t really cured from it’s dictatorial traits.  Keep on masturbating Nelly…