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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I kind of doubt this. Too much planning would be involved to:

  * pay people to add backdoors
  * tell DARPA
  * start a marketing arm to convince people to use it

Conspiracy stories very rarely turn out to be true; it's too hard to coordinate all of these efforts.

If it is true, though, it will be interesting to see how much code Cisco jacked from OpenBSD. (It's allowed by the license, but is probably a hard sell when you tell your Fortune 100 clients that they are just running OpenBSD but at 10000x the cost.)

Incidentally, I use OpenBSD for my VPN. But OpenVPN, not IPsec, as I could never figure it out :)

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"Conspiracy stories very rarely turn out to be true;"

That's because when they are found out to be true, nobody calls them "Conspiracy stories" any more. We call them "scandals". (ref: "Watergate Scandal"). Note that the perpetrators were indited for conspiracy.

"it's too hard to coordinate all of these efforts."

You're doing it wrong.

Every week you should be allowed to upvote something twice. Conspiracy is pervasive in life. As far as I can tell (and I provide no evidence to back this up), "conspiracy theories" are often correct but lacking the direct evidence to do anything about. Those who discount something as a "conspiracy theory" are usually (a) naive, (b) like being "right", (c) personally benefiting from the situation, or (d) going to find a way to benefit from it.

pay people to add backdoors

This is hard if you have the money? Done.

tell DARPA

When the FBI spooks go to the military contrator parties, who else do you think is there? If you know that something is tainted, you tell people who might return the favor.

start a marketing arm to convince people to use it

Why? It's free crypto. Done.

EDIT: A proper response to this kind of situation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006694

"Conspiracy is pervasive in life."

I think a definition of terms would be useful. Cooperation is necessary for much of what one does. At what point does cooperation become conspiracy?

When its criminal.

Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but the problem is that people abuse this framework to support all kind of weird accusations. It's very convenient, because it frees them from the burden of supporting their claims with evidence.

"It's a conspiracy, of course there is no evidence!"

I think its far more common to say "conspiracy theory" as a way to discredit an idea. Take 9/11 for example. Pah! Conspiracy theory. Yet the evidence is that the evidence presented by the government is total bullshit. Which is evidence of conspiracy. What, exactly, happened I expect we will never know. But the evidence is that something happened beyond planes flying into buildings.

"it's too hard to coordinate all of these efforts."

3 MILLION people have access to the docs Bradley Manning leaked. ONE leaked it. I think you're overstating the difficulty of coordinating activities.

The documents Manning leaked weren't really conspiracies. Nothing that I've seen so far is illegal, and most of it isn't even interesting.

3 million people didn't leak it because there was no compelling reason to leak them.

That's really an excellent point. Wikileaks is scandalous because it was leaked, not because of the content. There are a handful of embarrassing things in there, but that's it.

The best analogy I could come up with is if someone leaked all the private Facebook messages from all the students at a high school. Sure, feelings would be hurt, but at the end of the day it's really no big deal.

There was shocking information in the leaks -- that the government deliberately classified information that would simply make for bad PR and not to save lives or anything else.

To argue otherwise is anti-democratic.

Not really. I was not shocked. Were you shocked? If so, have you gotten all the sand out of your ears yet?

Well, I suspected it but in my opinion the public in general should be outraged by it. It's also a significant violation of the laws that prohibit the government from propagandizing the American people.

Lotta depressed kids would probably kill themselves if that happened.

Kind of. The cablegate is scandalous because it shows that wikileaks is serious and efficient. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain why virtually every country and major corporation in the world is shitting their pants now and want Assange's head on a silver plate. They figured they may be the next ones.

I'm not sure how trustworthy the following is, but they say that Medvedev's office unofficially recommends NGO to nominate Assange for a Nobel Peace Prize.

My guess it's because the cables regarding Russia are ridiculous beyond any recognition, they don't have ANY hard data and consist mostly of hoax and whatnot, there isn't anything there what you couldn't read in opposition media.

Public reaction here is more like:

    Cable: Russian government is mafia
    Russian citizen: ha-ha, oh wow

It also seems Putin has heavily criticized the UK for arresting Assange, claiming is the evidence that UK doesn't have a real democracy. I have no idea what's going on: the only explanation I could come with is that Putin is trolling hard.

The claim sounds weird to you because you are considering how the claim sounds to a citizen in a western democracy. The truth is, Putin really couldn't care less about that. The remarks were absolutely aimed at Russian citizens -- see, we are not that bad in comparison.

There appears to be an ongoing low-level diplomatic conflict between the UK and Russia since the FSB guy who was killed on British soil - I'm sure that plays a part in his comment.

The "conflict" has been going on ever since the Berezovsky received asylum in the UK. He continues to fund activities against the Russian government, but the UK refuses to extradite him. The reason all the politicians in the UK freaked out over Litvinenko is that it puts London's reputation as the leading safe haven for defectors/dissidents/mafiosos and their money in doubt. A big reason that London is the world's financial capital is that it is also the world's money laundering capital.

Of course none of this applies to people like Assange because they don't have any money or come from countries the US doesn't like.

He is just having fun :)

Extensive oil corporation involvement in the Nigerian government doesn't pique your interest?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991406

That's not all that new, though.

There was the revelation that the US and China worked together, or one might say conspired, to derail the Copenhagen Climate talks: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,733630,00.h...

I'll say that I dislike this, but I don't see anything illegal, or even unusual about this. This is absolutely politics as usual, and goes on every day in every country across the world. Every country lies to further their current interests.

I was more pointing my comment towards the notion that there was no conspiracy revealed. I do agree that everything thus far revealed by the cables hasn't been illegal in-and-of-itself nor is it all that surprising to those who have a non-romantic view of international diplomacy. It is an unfortunate truth that lying is a natural state of politics.

Not every conspiracy is illegal or unusual. They're still _wrong_, especially when perpetrated by governments against their people's will.

If it isn't illegal, it isn't a conspiracy.

I read about that particular collusion yesterday and it chilled me to the bone. It's the biggest thing to drop so far.

"3 million people didn't leak it because there was no compelling reason to leak them."

Or more likely dozens of people leaked them, but they weren't made publicly available until WikiLeaks got them.

"Boy-play" parties (and it aint Legos). They're even illegal in Afghanistan where they happened. Paid for by our tax dollars. And that's just a start. If you haven't seen anything illegal, you might want to open your eyes.

While we're at it: here's the legal definition of conspiracy: http://www.lectlaw.com/def/c103.htm

WikiLeaks documents many such conspiracies.

So I looked around for the cable you mention, and as best I can tell, government contractor Dyncorp was involved (I haven't seen a cable that says how exactly) in boy-play parties. The cable details how the Afghanis involved in the party were arrested and put on trial, and asks for help in quashing an article about the event. Is that accurate?

I'll admit this is probably the closest item I've seen to passing the test of something that might actually be worth whistle-blowing on. To fully pass the test, I'd need to see something that detailed who from Dyncorp was involved and to what extent.

My main complaint with the leaked cables, and the reason I have zero qualms about Manning being court marshaled (or even tried for treason) is that he in no way was discriminant about what he released. A whistle-blower needs clear concise evidence of real wrongdoing. Manning lazily dumped a huge archive of classified information without any real item to point to say this is wrong.

"To fully pass the test, I'd need to see something that detailed who from Dyncorp was involved and to what extent."

Yes, thats where the "conspiracy" bit comes in. We know these things are happening. We know they are being funded by Dynocorp which is itself funded 95% by US tax dollars. But who exactly organized it, well, gosh, nobody actually wrote it down. Yet we are to believe that nobody knew. Like, "who could have imagined people would fly planes into buildings?", as our Secretary of State blathered. (Answer: NORAD. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.h...)

Consider how many people were part of stuxnet, and no leaks have come out. This seems far more manageable.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/stuxnet-breakthrough

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