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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

> if it wasn't this exploit, it'd be a different one --- will be a different one

It has been the go-to argument against regulations by the weapon industry that if we don't produce and sell the weapons then countries will just buy it from someone else. War and conflict will happen regardless where the purchased weapon was produced.

Bad actors will have a slight harder time if fewer people produced exploits and keep known vulnerabilities secret. If fewer people produce weapon the cost of war increase. Producing exploit will always have the cost of making it slightly easier for criminals to comit crime.

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And to think, all we ask in return is that the United States cease doing computer-based signals intelligence, while the rest of the world continues to do it. A small price to pay for making it slightly harder for criminals to commit crime!

Except the "rest of the world" didn't shoot itself in the face with its own cyber weapons and had articles written about it.

US politicians and citizens are right to ask whether the current strategy is the right one.

Saying that you can either have this sigint or no sigint is obviously a false dilemma.

In fact your whole original reply is some bizarre technical justification for what is obviously a military strategy which has harmed the US and other countries and that can be changed by the US.

Excellent comment.

We lead the arms race, in all categories.

Whenever an adversarial Nation buys new kit, missiles or heavy metal, it's to keep up, or keep out, the US.

China's rise in offensive technological process was undoubtedly in response to its knowledge (retrieved through hacking) of the extensive measures on US side.

We can set the pace. And that pace needs to slow down.

It is a hard sell. If we ask the weapon industry to stop selling weapons some other country in the world would get the money.

Here in Sweden it is a very hard sell. About 1/3 of the yearly government revenue from state own companies come from selling weapon. About 85% is sold directly to countries with ongoing wars, mostly in the middle east. If they didn't buy ours they would just go elsewhere.

If we must present it as an all of nothing, then yes. Making it slightly harder is a goal worth while. If we can get nuanced about it then a priority goal is to reduce the risk of bad actors getting their hands on weapon we produce. This can be achieved by stricter regulation, which for computer-based signals intelligence means greater funding to protect the existing weapons and using them less as each use involve risk. This would go against the cost of fewer and more costly computer-based signals intelligence operations.

Since we keep hearing about US developed exploits being used by bad actors it means that the US is not spending enough funding on protecting their weapons or use them so regularly that they end up in the wrong hands anyway. A small price to pay is to adjust those numbers, and having a political discussion about what those numbers should look like.

The US probably spends more on defensive security by orders of magnitude.

But, exploits being produced or not doesn't change the fact that exploitable bugs exist in the first place. I would say it's preferable to have people making exploits so these bugs get patched sooner or later.

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