Google's Brazil unit says will suspend Orkut pages

SAO PAULO, Brazil, May 25 (Reuters) Google Inc. will remove several community pages on its popular Brazilian social network site Orkut after Brazilian authorities said they promote violence, terrorism and child pornography.

''Those (pages) that our Orkut team can identify as inconsistent with its principals will be immediately removed.'' a spokeswoman for the local Google unit said today.

The spokeswoman added that a list provided by an official government task force, including federal police and prosecutors and non-government Internet watchdogs, was vague and it would be difficult to identify certain pages.

''We may require further details from the task force to identify some pages. Sometime they just provide a picture,'' she said, adding this could delay the removal of some pages.

Some of the community pages singled out by the task force seek the assassination of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva or the blowing up of Congress, promote child pornography or terrorism, Brazilian authorities said.

A fifth site is suspected of being created by the First Command of the Capital, or PCC, a criminal gang behind a recent wave of violence in Sao Paulo state that killed about 150 people.

''The PCC uses the Internet to buy arms and arrange attacks against the police. The photos of many of the policemen killed in Sao Paulo were published in the chat room,'' Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh, president of the Chamber of Deputies human rights commission and leader of the task force, told Reuters.

Brazilian government lawyers accuse the world's biggest Internet search engine of hindering investigations by guarding the anonymity of Web users on sites its says promote violence. Google says that, under U.S. law, it cannot reveal personal information about its clients.

Greenhalgh said he hoped to conclude an agreement within two weeks that would allow Google to help identify users of these pages.

Brazilian authorities say they need Google's cooperation in order to catch criminals who live in the United States.

Orkut has about 16 million users, about 72 percent of whom are Brazilian, according to Google data.

In April, Google Senior Vice President for Corporate Development David Drummond, came to Brazil to testify to Congress and promised to collaborate with Brazilian authorities within the limits of U S law.

Safernet, a private group fighting human rights abuses on the Internet, has complained to Brazil's attorney general's office about Orkut. It presented a 150-page dossier alleging child pornography, racial discrimination, drug trafficking and support of Nazism.

REUTERS DH RN0256