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Comment by theylon | Hacker News Reader

If your company is in Russia, China or the US, and the government in that country has any interest in the data you collect, you will have to give it away. In Russia and China they just do it, in the US it's a matter of "National Security". I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone - maybe because most of us are on the side of the latter.

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Russian and China coercion are on a completely different scale, and we all know it. Especially after the Snowden backlash.

Imagine any major Chinese IT company pushing back against government requests like Dreamhost did. Even the biggest ones can't/won't. It helps that the government is a huge investor in most of them, of course.

"Chinese IT company rebuffs government demand for user information on its website". This headline does not exist.

A lot of that is because Russia and China don't feel very secure compared to the US for various historical/geopolitical reasons. The US govt is known to act ruthlessly when it feels there's an existential threat.

Arrant nonsense

You've been breaking the HN guidelines by repeatedly posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, and also by using HN for flamewars and ideological battle.

We ban such accounts that do these things, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop?

Feel like this is moving goalposts, especially given the context of this discussion (IT corps protecting their users from the government).

Think about the fact that the FBI had to actually get a warrant to even begin talking to Lavabit. They had to actually go through bureaucracy. It was not instantly handed over to them on request.

But they have successfully shut down the Lavabit as a result.

As a Ukrainian Jew, the idea that Russia doesn't act as, if not more, ruthlessly than the U.S. is pretty laughable.

As an Arab Muslim, the idea that the US is any better is laughable.

You must not live in Afghanistan.

As a Turkish atheist, I cannot even express my feelings on the Internet.

The Soviet Union committed far worse crimes up to the 1950’s. The US did far worse (Vietnam, Iraq, many other wars) since WW2.

The Russian government is presently bombing hospitals in Syria.

Sure. So did the US in Mosul.

In this article and the nyt one they are actually saying US is doing it and it's not even a secret. Here is a quote:

"The N.S.A. bans its analysts from using Kaspersky antivirus at the agency, in large part because the agency has exploited antivirus software for its own foreign hacking operations and knows the same technique is used by its adversaries."

That is not the same thing. The fact that they've exploited AV does not mean that they coerced an AV company into installing 0day for them. Those are very very different things.

Ok, four questions:

1. Is hacking into a foreign AV company by a state an OK thing to do?

2. How do we know the anonymous source is being truthful?

3. If yes to the first two, are we certain that it wasn't exploited but was coerced?

4. If all of these things are true and they were coerced, what is the practical difference for the party being monitored?

The difference is that in theory, you can make secure software in the US that hides information from the gov't. For example the secure enclave on newer iPhones. Of course, if you don't make secure software, they will get exploited by security services.

In China it is not even theoretically possible because the gov't mandates backdoors and can easily shut down your company if you don't comply. You have way less recourse on rule of law.

You are absolutely right that we don't know any of these things for sure. My point is not that we know them for sure. Simply that, as written, the article does not claim the US to have done something morally equivalent to Russia. And to my knowledge, there is no evidence that the US has done something like that, either.

Even if US government doesn't have such power as chinese (though I doubt they don't have) there still can be a motivation for US companies to cooperate because it can be mutually beneficial (for example, a company in exchange can get some contracts or some changes in legislation).

This is a gross false equivalence.

Yes. I find it annoying in these threads how people refuse to acknowledge that we have much stronger rule of law in the west. Even though it's flawed and abused, every rational actor prefers our system.

> we have much stronger rule of law in the west

Domestically perhaps, but not when it comes to international law (eg. sanctioning torture, extrajudicial killings, drone strikes, illegal invasion etc.)

> Domestically perhaps, but not when it comes to international law

One of these is a thing with courts, enforcement mechanisms, et cetera. The other is really only relevant for preventing war between global powers, i.e. the Security Council.

>I find it annoying in these threads how people refuse to acknowledge that we have much stronger rule of law in the west.

No we don't. We have a stronger belief in the rule of law, but not an actual practice of rule of law. It's been getting worse and worse over the past two decades and at this point I see little difference between any particular western government and Russia's.

If you haven't noticed it, you've been willfully ignorant.

> at this point I see little difference between any particular western government and Russia's

There is quality research in measuring, quantitatively and qualitatively, the rule of law [1].

While disagreement abounds around methods and data, it's pretty universally observed that the rule of law in Russia is worse than that in the West.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joseph_Bajjalieh/public...

The parent comment is probably right. In Russia even election results are forged by Putin supporters.

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