Comment by ravenscrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenscrow | Hacker News Reader

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> So it's pretty obvious by now that we are actively at war with China and Russia on the cyber front.

We are actively fighting a cyber war with every country. The nations who we spy on the most are our allies. And the nations who spy on us the most are our allies. I know it's counterintuitive but it's international politics, geopolitics and intelligence 101.

For example, israel, Britain, Canada, germany, japan, south korea, etc spy on us the most. And naturally we spy on them too.

And taken a step even further, every nation's government spies the most on their own people. It's almost a certainty that intranational spying makes up most of the spying budgets of china, russia, britain, israel, US, germany, etc.

> The question is, are we winning?

Considering we are the epicenter of tech, what do you think? Considering our intelligence budgets dwarf both china and russia's budget combined, what do you think?

> Are we even fighting back?

Are you serious? Who do you think invented cyber spying? The internet was a DARPA project.

Do you really think only china and russia are spying?

Citations needed.

I know some intelligence people. This isn't what they tell me. They tell me that western governments are obsessed with following the law and limiting what their cyber operations touch. It's born out by what I understand from non-classified sources. For example, I read through the source code of Stuxnet when it first came out. There was a ton of guards put in to limit the potential damage it made.

That Canada spies on the USA more than Russia is the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Read the Snowden leaks and listen to natsec podcasts. The Russians are in a ton of the US infrastructure and the CIA is freaking out about it to the point where they consider cyber to be a bigger existential threat than a nuclear armed DPRK.

If Stuxnet being limited to interfering with its intended target is your example of how Western intelligence is over concerned with limits to their operations’ scope, I think you hold our services to a very low standard, both ethically and practically. Would it have been responsible, or in the nation’s best interests, to allow Stuxnet to play with any industrial equipment it found itself on? And further, would such a blatant infection have half a chance of hitting its actual objectives?

You also seem to assume that, however badly the Russians have us over a barrel through infected infrastructure, that we haven’t gotten into their stuff just as badly, or worse. All the regulations that U.S. spooks complain about aren’t a problem once you’re on foreign soil working on foreign targets. Cyberwarfare favors the attacker, just because we’re very vulnerable isn’t a reason to believe we don’t have the upper hand.

(And as noted, the U.S.’s budget for this stuff is way greater than our opponents’. If we’re not decisively on top something is seriously wrong.)

Just because the microcosm that your contacts happen to see within our compartmentalized and super secret intelligence agencies happens to (supposedly, through two levels of rumor) be on the up and up, doesn't make that a rule for these organizations.

In fact, most everything published besides your testimony suggests the opposite.

Just saw this.

I'm happy to change my view when I encounter new evidence, but I see absolutely no evidence that the Canadians (or anyone else outside of Russia / China) have hacked the shit out of the entire USA.

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