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Comment by Merman_Mike | Hacker News Reader

Does the US conduct offensive cyber operations like this?

I feel like we never hear about them in the news.

All nations do. It's become very normal. On the surface relations are nice and respectful. But we even spy on our allies behind closed doors. Take the case of Germany, that became public knowledge because of wikileaks. We had Angela Merkel's office wiretapped, among other things[1]. After it became known, they hardly responded past some internal investigations. I think their Senate switched to storing documents offline too. But at this point it isn't something inexcusable. And you can be sure Germany does too[2]. Knowledge is power.

1- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-usa-spying-idUSKC...

2- https://m.dw.com/en/how-the-uss-cia-and-germanys-bnd-spied-o...

This is actually pretty fucked up

Welcome to the world :)

Is it really? Theoretically with perfect information you don't need to go to war, you can just compute the result and start with treaty negotiations.

This. There's actually an argument that spying helps peace.

My dad (a journalist, RIP) was once at a UN conference in the 70s, and made the remark to a Chinese official in a light-hearted spirit: "of course you spy on us, we spy on you, and what's wrong with that?" This caused a major row and he was forced to apologize.

It's just business.

It seems like a fair game to me. You can always protect yourself by investing in cyber-security if you don't want to be spied on.

It's not like war where innocent people die and a there's a lot of human suffering. It's just a tech race where the nations doing a good job get a deserved advantage without doing direct damage to the population.

Unless someone exacts extensive damage to something like the electrical grid. In which case it would cause mass suffering and death. Don't underestimate the steel trap of that cold war mentality.

There are hacks that can cause extensive destruction. But it isn't good to talk about them lest we give people ideas.

All nations don't.

Some are too poor (take your pick). Others are rich, but small (the Vatican). Most just don't care enough to prioritise it over better things they could be doing.

And then, there are countries that simply consider the US an ally, and consider it morally dubious or practically unpromising to spy on them.

Add this up, and I'd be willing to give at least 10:1 odds it's one of a list of maybe ten suspects, even when adjusted for GDP or population.

As an aside, I'd really be curious why this "everyone does it" is used anytime something like this comes up? Is it just macho "I don't have friends but there are useful idiots that consider themselves my friend" talk? Is it nihilistic/cynical pretentiousness? International whataboutism to defend one's team?

Because it certainly isn't based on any actual data. If you add up offensive hacking by the USA, China, Russia, Israel, and maybe two or three others, you're pretty well done with the full list, but still close to <x> nations short, where <x> is the number of nations that exist.

Not all nations, just the bad ones.

Some does, some don't, is not a new normal, is mostly for power players. But anyway, none is even near at the scale and reach of what the US does. And for most of it they don't even need to hack, just handle a request for the customers data to any US based service (ask Lavabit about that).

There was a guy called "Edward Snowden" who revealed a bunch of offensive cyber operations a while back. You may have heard of him.

They pretty much don't ever want you to hear about them in the news. They don't want compromised entities to know they are compromised so they will keep revealing sensitive information through the systems; they don't want specific vulnerabilities they are using to be known so they won't be patched, or even the general sorts of capabilities they have to be known; and at least traditionally it's thought like it makes the U.S. (or any other country) look bad to be breaking other country's laws and spying on them like this, when it's a country we theoretically aren't in hostilities with. It might make the attacked nations feel they have to retaliate in some way too, if it's public.

Perhaps if the NSA focused more on defense instead of offense, they'd have been better able to protect our own government against this sort of attack. Who can say if some of the vulnerabilities used were ones the NSA in fact knew about but was keeping in it's pocket for it's own use. A well-resourced expert federal agency actually focused on security could make everyone safer from snooping; when they instead prioritize snooping themselves, they instead help make everyone less safe from snooping.

History is written by the victors, as they say

Trust me, you will not hear about them. Also, when the US government detects it's been infiltrated, it's also rare to hear about it. That's why whenever you see articles like this that make attribution, I recommend viewing them with skepticism, simply because the information is specifically selected.

Most large deals (e.g.: aerospace, defence contracts, infrastructure projects) are backed by diplomacy and/or various flavors of espionage.

Yes. Stuxnet being the most famous which brought this to more daylight -'cat out of the bag.'

Trump admin also did a press push after changing policy to ramp up digital offense [1]. Notably these stories were obviously is coordinated and on purpose. e.g. not just someone leaker talking to reporter it was strategy.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/under-tru...

That push was actually interesting, since they were intentionally being open about their cyber capabilities. They also had a "press tour" about how they hacked ISIS [0]. There's clearly some mind games going on by showing your hand like that.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/763545811/how-the-u-s-hacked-...

Totally interesting! Kind of similar mindset to nuclear weapons it seems being open about our capabilities; if you attack us, we attack you as a deterrent.

But that doesn't seem to stop Russia who doesn't give AF already under huge sanctions, or non-state groups like ISIS

The United States has admitted to perpetrating coups to get a us-friendly dictator in otherwise democratic societies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI

Curious how this is connected at all to my question?

I know "America Bad" is trendy now, but I don't see the connection.

Espionage is less aggressive and overt than perpetrating coups in democratic societies.

His question was "does the US conduct cyber espionage", not "does the USA do bad things?"

Let's not let every post about international politics degenerate into a contest about which state is the wickedest.

Please, this isn't Reddit. The US just happens to be part of the list of bad guys together with Russia, North Korea, Israel, PRC, etc. The difference is that on sites with a lot of US users pointing the finger at the US is more often than not seen as someone being Edgy or whatever while pointing it at Russia is cool/patriotic/stating the facts/etc.

This. Over the past few months I've noticed HN slowly slipping into the reddit-esque, us-centric groupthink in the comments section.

The bias is apparent and I fear the trend is accelerating.

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