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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

So it's an act of war. Now what?

Does the US escalate to a shooting war with the second biggest nuclear power in the world?

So it's not surprising Russia thinks they can act with a lot of impunity without facing catastrophic consequences.

US imposed individual sanctions and explicitly named hackers from the GRU after the DOD investigated 2016 election hacking, effectively authorizing their arrest if stepping on western soil. This will be handled diplomatically through the State Dept. first. There is little incentive to starting a war with Russia I don't think.

I may be wrong, but I thought members of the security apparatus weren't allowed to leave the country in Russia? I may be horrendously wrong, but I thought someone mentioned that when these sanctions came out about Guccifer 2 and such.

There are ways for US to retaliate through espionage, such as doing a mass round up of minor russian spy assets that usually aren't worth the effort to go after, going after russian operations in places in which neither country have jurisdiction in, exposing blackmail of some random oligarch, stirring up unrest with plausible deniability, etc.

Essentially make life difficult for the people who actually run Russia.

You risk destroying your leverage if you do this, but some partial retaliation is indeed a good idea. It might be the case that those avenues for retaliation are already almost saturated.

We can try sanctions, but we've pretty much maxed out that route after the Crimea annexation.

If we do nothing, we're sending the message that these actions are okay.

>If we do nothing, we're sending the message that these actions are okay.

I think it sends the message that these actions won’t trigger nuclear war. How would you even get public support for war with Russia?

Maybe we should "send the message" that we won't install insecure shit on our networks?

no... nuclear war before free software.

Microsoft’s rejected new slogan.

We aren’t even close to maxing out what could be accomplished with economic sanctions! The US and Russia still have a direct trading relationship!

Does anyone believe the US isn’t doing similar shit themselves ? In that light it seems pretty disingenuous to call out others for the same act.

One of the shortcoming of maximalist position, you lost your leverage.

The US Government does stuff like this to other countries all. the. time.

We don't hear about it much. But if this is an "act of war" the US has conducted dozens of these kinds of "attacks" on others over the last ten or fifteen years.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon [0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Zero-Day-Stuxnet-Digital-eb...

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