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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

Why would a, for example, US citizen be more concerned about a foreign government spying on them than their own government? To play devil's advocate, my government is in a much stronger position to harass me than some country I may never visit again.

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The chances of foreign entities using that information for profit or for ill are probably much higher than if it were US govt. spying. US govt. spying would be more concerned about security and criminal issues, if they were indeed inside your computer; Chinese entities could consider the more broad use of that information, maybe even for individual financial enrichment or identity theft.

US citizens at least have some laws in place to protect them, while if China steals your stuff you are just wholesale boned.

Because if a foreign government installs software on your computer for the purpose of spying on your country's government or major corporations, your own government may consider that indistinguishable from an act of deliberate espionage. Even if you manage to avoid prosecution or other extrajudicial punishments (e.g. the no-fly list, or being barred from government-related employment for life), there's a good chance your hardware will be confiscated (and even if you get it back, which is uncertain, are you really ever going to trust that they haven't secretly rooted it?).

TL;DR: it is because of your government that you should be worried about spying by foreign governments.

Am I reading this comment wrong, or is it giving blanket legal advice to an international audience?

You're reading it wrong. It's conjecture. Speculative. I won't weigh in on its validity beyond to point out it's apparent speculation.

Lets say you work logistics for a company who makes weapons systems, or partial weapon systems, for the US military. Your work email has blueprints from engineers and/or customers that aren't technically classified, but are export controlled nonetheless. If the enemy knows you work logistics for this company and they want to know how this system works, they can use the blueprints in your email.

Lets say you work for Samsung in purchasing and someone in China has a knock-off chip that they want to sell to Samsung, but Samsung won't move away from their current provider. They could use your login information to log into your account with the competing supplier and view pricing information that gives them the upper hand in negotiations.

Lets say you work at a business consulting firm who does business with an upstream supplier to Raytheon. China is trying to figure out information on Raytheon's project and is mapping out their supply chain. By targeting your conversations with your client (who is in Raytheon's supply chain) China could learn a lot of valuable information about their target.

To the best of my knowledge, the US government has not stolen corporate secrets and forwarded them to their favored companies.

The European Union's investigation into the ECHELON program found otherwise.

A high level overview is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Concerns

The actual EU report is available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

the only thing approaching 'stealing corporate secrets' in this is detecting bribery by european corporations trying to win contracts

Is there something actually proven and more comprehensive, than speculation from two decades ago? Nearly all of the concerns listed in your Echelon link, are political in nature (eg about Princess Diana, or the five eyes with Canada spying on two British ministers for Britain in 1983), not examples of industrial IP theft.

Baseless claims won't cut it. The US has had by far the world's largest economy for the last two decades. There should be dozens of legally proven - court cases - examples of intellectual property theft far worse and larger than anything China has done, given the scale difference of the economies over that time and the supposed capacity to hoover up global communications and put it to use in industrial espionage.

Saying that well: here's one example, or here's two examples across 30 years, is not good enough to indict the world's largest and most technologically advanced economy for being rampant industrial thieves. To show a comprehensive pattern of deep industrial espionage, and to show that it isn't more along the lines of routine espionage that occurs between any two great economic powers, requires a lot more proof.

There should be dozens of legally proven - court cases - examples of intellectual property theft far worse and larger than anything China has done, given the scale difference of the economies over that time and the supposed capacity to hoover up global communications and put it to use in industrial espionage.

How many legally proven court cases against industrial espionage carried by the Chinese State are there?

Such furious goal shifting. Demand evidence and then assert the evidence doesn't show rampant thievery. It's absolutely shameless.

In an interview with Germany's ARD TV channel, the former NSA contractor said the agency would spy on big German companies that competed with US firms. [0]

President Barack Obama got a list of talking points that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hoped to hit on during a one-on-one meeting, courtesy of the NSA's X-Keyscore program. - not economic but it's hard to imagine this tactic wouldn't apply to economy related meetings [1,2]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/25907502

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/nsas-spying-on-united-nations-and-...

[2] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/07/01/un-secretary-ge...

Pen and paper.. best defense.

"The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage"

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...

FWIW, GCHQ's powers are explicitly exercisable in the "interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom". Given the close cooperation between the UK and the US, I would not be surprised if the information is also forwarded to the US.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/13/section/3

I'm less concerned with corporate 'secrets' and more concerned with citizen privacy rights.

Foreign governments are not concerned with spying on you for the sake of tailoring ads to you. They are concerned with furthering state objectives, which may include proxying traffic through your computer for the purpose of concealing origin, infiltrating public and private infrastructure for the purpose of sabotage, exfiltrating corporate and state secrets, etc.

The US government has overthrown democratically elected governments in other countries to install a government more friendly to specific US corporations.

The US government has jailed the only known telecom CEO to resist warrant-less spying.

The US government has arguably had a major hand in building Stuxnet, which used two zero-day vulns in MS Windows and two stolen Windows driver signing certificates.

Unfortunately the CIA archives are not open to the public.

I don't even know what the big deal is. Countries don't get prosperous by singing kumbaya and group hug sessions. Mine certainly didn't. Whatever it takes as long as you get away with it.

A foreign entity could use data about the company you work for, found in emails and texts, to disrupt the market. This could eventually lead to a market crash or businesses going under, etc. costing you a job and income.

Extreme example, I get it, but I can’t imagine it is too far from a real scenario.

Don’t forget, the Chinese government runs many businesses that compete with US businesses. If ruining you, or sabotaging your company, helps their their companies steal business they will do it. It’s not dissimilar to Japanese businesses in the 80s except without the pesky moral code.

you might be an ordinary citizen. But what if some day you end up being a high level govt official, or a CEO of a big tech company handling millions of other citizens' private information? That Huawei phone you had, if indeed rootkit-ed and your data was being collected, will come back and bite you.

It's not a matter of just harassing you. There are real consequences with compromised communications.

Think of Midway Battle. Think of Enigma.

You can say, hey look that proves US/UK govt can spy on you. Never mind Japan/German nations were at war with US. But I digress.

But if those didn't happen, you and I all have a high chance of being a second class citizen (or just a person and not a full citizen) in some totalitarian state in modern date, either being forced to use German or Japanese language. And that is if you are lucky. Many in modern time have a high chance of not being born if German/Japan won WW2. And key battles in WW2 were won by Allies due to breaches in communication network of Japan/German.

Yes, US/UK or any western govt spying on citizens is distasteful. But the communist Chinese govt spying on you and using that information will be far worse than that.

would you rather have your mother looking at your phone or that creepy neighbor from down the street?

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