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Comment by southeastern | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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).

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.

This is actually pretty fucked up

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 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.

It's just business.

Welcome to the world :)

Not all nations, just the bad ones.

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