And as a U.S. resident, even as I acknowledge and deplore what the U.S. intelligence services have done to others, I still don't want China to do that to me. This is not an area where equitable (but bad) treatment makes things right IMO.
History shows that government isn't your friend at all. The US might be a rare exception from time to time. But even that would be very, very limited.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't mind 5G spyware from another country.
Other countries programs aren't good or anything, but anyone who's deluded themselves into thinking the US is some kind of clean actor, not participating in this sort of stuff, or only using it for good is more optimistic than I could ever manage being.
1 %? I assume 80+ %. E v e r y o n e has secrets.
It’s clear that the CCP is assembling a database of information on everyone in the developed world, not just in China, and that they intend to use it as part of their soft power arsenal (along everything else from economic incentives to Confucious Institutes).
The CCP is much more frightening and less accountable than the US Govt, especially as they reach parity in soft and hard power.
No: go read about National Security Letters.
That really depends on the government, and how heavily they rely on domestic surveillance as an instrument of political control. It also depends on the geopolitical and diplomatic situation, and the risks that stem from that.
In China for instance, domestic surveillance is a clear threat any of its citizens that choose to be dissidents and advocate for change. For instance, I have friends there who are very angry about the coronavirus situation, but have to be careful about what they say and how they say it to avoid risking government attention. Even with an extremely dark and cynical view of the US government, that kind of threat is far less for US citizens.
Foreign spying can be dangerous to you, personally, but usually in a more indirect and collective way [1]. The most obvious example of this is war. If your country loses one to a more brutal and oppressive adversary, you'll likely find yourself is a worse, if not outright bad, position. On a smaller and more mundane scale, foreign industrial espionage could put you out of a job.
[1] You may be a target of foreign direct spying if you're friend of a dissident, a government employee, a government official, or have access to valuable technology or trade secrets, etc.
This is an incredibly foolish line of reasoning. Compromising the trust and sovereignty of individuals in the U.S. is an extreme risk, and it can come for anyone. The U.S. government at least will tend not to try undermining the U.S. economy except through specific policy initiatives; the Chinese government has a permanent interest in controlling the U.S. economy, and holding the threat of compromise over our heads.
No government is your friend, but there's really no comparing the abusiveness of the CCP, both at home and abroad, to the U.S. equivalent, and I'm honestly shocked that I ever have to remind people in the west of this.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
Exactly. Huawei even kinda smells the same. From the OP:
> As Widman settled in, the secret partners adopted a set of principles for rigged algorithms, according to the BND history. They had to be “undetectable by usual statistical tests” and, if discovered, be “easily masked as implementation or human errors.”
> In other words, when cornered, Crypto executives would blame sloppy employees or clueless users.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...:
> Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices
> "The work of HCSEC [Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre]… reveals serious and systematic defects in Huawei's software engineering and cyber security competence," said the HCSEC oversight board in its annual report, published this morning.
Makes me wonder what we've done using the fact US companies (ex: Cisco) control large swathes of the internet's infrastructure.
Wouldn't China/Russia make some noise if they had proof the Cisco was hiding something in their infra?
Also complaining means you reveal what you know, which helps narrow what you don't know.
Why should Cisco/Juniper/Ericsson/etc compete with Huawei when they can more easily use political pressure to exclude them from the market?
Guess they would also be able to do location tracking though and that's not so easily solved.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
Nobody uses Tor: Everyone is surveilled.
Few activists use Tor: Activists are easy to pick and everyone else is easy to surveill.
Everyone uses Tor: Nobody can be surveilled.
Nothing to gain by not using Tor, only one way to win, use Tor and tell everyone else to use Tor too.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma, and not using Tor is like betraying others just in case things ever get bad.
Also, I think quite a bit of telecomm traffic is encrypted by the telecomm carrier itself. For example I don't think my iPhone, by default, encrypts/decrypts SMS or voice calls on the device. To the extent text messages and mobile phone calls are resistant to dumb eavesdropping, that's provided by the mobile carrier. So having access into all the equipment at the carrier would be a nice centralized place to sit and observe/record.
A nation-state type actor can hoover up everything and retroactively decrypt.
Where is the self-interest in the US pressuring European (mostly EU) countries to use EU competitors?