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Comment by Lendal | Hacker News Reader

> Snowden’s revelations have hurt the United States’ relations with some allies and slowed the sales of U.S. technology products abroad.

So it wasn't the spying that hurt the relations, it was Snowden. Okay. I'll stop reading now. This news source just discredited itself.

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You should have continued:

>> Peter Swire, one of five members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, said the Kaspersky report showed that it is essential for the country to consider the possible impact on trade and diplomatic relations before deciding to use its knowledge of software flaws for intelligence gathering.

“There can be serious negative effects on other U.S. interests,” Swire said.

That's an awfully uncharitable reading of that sentence. Let me emphasize this for you:

>Snowden’s revelations have hurt the United States’ relations with some allies and slowed the sales of U.S. technology products abroad.

So it wasn't the spying that hurt the relations, it was the revelations that the spying was happening?

All countries spy. In fact it is imperative that they do

Only a couple countries are truly effective at it, although all would like to be.

Wake me up when Austrian malware causes a total collapse of key infrastructure projects in a developing nation that didn't deserve it...

the word "deserve" is very subjective... who gets to decide who is "deserving"?

Hopefully, the democratic public.

Realistically though, authoritarian power brokers.

I apologize for the rabbit hole. But I must ask: the "democratic public" of North Korea? or just "mob rule" in general? the "authoritarian power brokers" of the US? or Russia (i.e. Ukraine, Odessa, etc...)?, China (i.e. India, Tibet, Myanmar vs. Rohingyas, etc...)?

The line has to be drawn somewhere. The UN has proven to be quite useless.

Edit - Link Added: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/china-endorses-myanmars...

True power is assumed, never granted.

Austrian foreign policy only helped bring about a world war.

No, not all countries at the same level, for the same reason.

It can be from defense to big attack.

Only the big one can really have the budget to do so.

Zero countries control as many key technologies trusted by other countries as the US

If Snowden hadn't revealed this, the sales of technology products would probably not have slowed down. So, they are not wrong.

he's pointing out the semiotics used by the chosen wording.

it's no accident and it puts unnecessary emphasis on the mensager.

obviously it can be parsed to the correct meaning. but the subjective one should be considered too.

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