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Brazil signs law enhancing penalties for crimes committed using a VPN
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Illustration only Photo by Dharaneeswaran R on Unsplash
Developers in Brazil now face greater legal exposure if their software enables VPN use that later facilitates a crime, reflecting the state’s escalating stance on privacy tools.
The law follows a pattern where Brazilian authorities have increasingly fined individuals for using VPNs to bypass court-ordered blocks, as seen in the X/Twitter case. It signals that merely providing or using a VPN can attract heightened criminal liability, raising compliance costs for any service that touches encrypted tunneling.
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Brazil’s ANPD ordered Discord’s Go Live feature shut down nationwide because its end-to-end encryption prevents content surveillance.
During the X/Twitter nationwide block, authorities imposed a daily fine of R$ 50,000 for anyone accessing the platform via VPN and sought to remove VPN apps from app stores.
Congress passed and the president signed a sentence enhancement that adds extra punishment for crimes committed while using a VPN, building on earlier VPN-related penalties.
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The amendment adds a sentence enhancement for any crime that is committed while using a VPN. Previously, Brazilian courts had only imposed fines on individuals who accessed blocked services via VPN, as in the X/Twitter case. Now the law explicitly raises the punishment level for the underlying offense when a VPN is involved. This shifts the risk from a monetary penalty to a potential increase in incarceration time.
Software engineers who create or distribute VPN clients, or any application that can route traffic through an encrypted tunnel, must now consider whether their tool could be linked to a VPN-related crime. Mitigation strategies might include implementing usage policies, restricting access to known malicious actors, or adding audit logs that can be provided to authorities. These measures increase development effort, require legal review, and may affect product performance or user experience. Failure to address the risk could expose the provider to secondary liability under the new enhancement.
The legal change assumes that VPN usage remains detectable enough to be attributed to a user; however, against a state-level deep-packet-inspection firewall, VPN handshakes are identified and blocked at the backbone. In such environments, simply using a VPN does not guarantee anonymity, and the state can already trace metadata even when traffic is encrypted. Consequently, the deterrent effect of higher criminal penalties is limited when the technical barrier makes VPN use both risky and easily detectable. Developers relying solely on legal compliance may find their tools ineffective where the state can enforce blocking at the network layer.
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