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Comment by mtw | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Russia is doing obviously hostile acts (elections, hacking government agencies, invasion of Ukraine & others, covert operations and so on...) against the US, and not much is done.

Meanwhile, I can't remember a covert operation done by China or a visible invasion of a third-party country (except putting concrete on a few inhabited islands) and then everything is done to portray them as the bad guys and ban entire industries

I can't help thinking of either racism, or politicians being controlled by Russian intelligence (possibly them not being unaware of this)

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> Meanwhile, I can't remember a covert operation done by China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cyberwarfare

Major incidents include the 2010 Google gmail hack, the F-35 blueprints hack, multiple military contractor breaches, the 2015 OPM hack which the leaked the details of most FBI/CIA agents worldwide, and the 2017 Equifax hack which stole information on 145 million Americans.

So basically a minor fraction of NSA’s surveillance.

That’s just because there’s no Chinese Snowden yet. What do you know about surveillance in Asia? If you’re here speaking English I reckon you know nothing.

Perhaps. But that’s just speculation, while for NSA there are solid proofs.

There are tons of well documented cases of China straight up mass MITMing their citizen's traffic. And this is legally authorized under their law.

In 2014 they MITM'd iCloud. In 2018 they simply required Apple to hand over iCloud to a local state-owned company. Apple no longer controls iCloud in China, the Guizhou government does.

I don't think the surveillance in China is even remotely comparable to anything that has ever happened in the US.

Same as in any other country, in particular USA - is there any western country without lawful interception laws?

The difference is, China doesn't seem to be spying on the rest of the world, while NSA is documented to be doing so.

False. The NSA has never been shown to (or even suspected of) commit intellectual property theft, which is what several of the above incidents are.

So the incidents described in eg https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellig... (40 thousand breach attempts related to industrial espionage, in a single case in Germany) never happened?

Please show what the actual accusations of espionage are in that article - because I don't see any.

„ At the BND, the project group charged with supporting the parliamentary investigative committee once again looked at the NSA selectors. In the end, they discovered fully 40,000 suspicious search parameters, including espionage targets in Western European governments and numerous companies.”

There’s more of course, but... have you actually read that article?

As for the F-35 blueprints, they can have them!

China is an economic competitor to the US while Russia is essentially not. China controls a lot of the supply chains that the US depends on which gives it great but subtle power. It's not in the interests of a nation to allow another nation that much control over the items it depends on. They may not use that power right now but that can change at any moment and there may less public uses of that power. Same reason China (and Russia) pushes home grown companies over foreign companies.

At the same time, the US controls the financial monetary system (petrodollar), dominates the world military-wise, tech and so on. If one is able to follow this logic, does that mean that Europe and other countries should also take hostile measures against the US since they control "supply chains" and has "great but subtle" powers over them?

Yes they should and in some ways they are with various laws aiming to curb the power of large (US) tech companies. They also seem to have stronger laws protecting domestic industries than the US although I might be wrong. Europe failing to protect itself properly against either the US or China (see how much of UK infrastructure is owned by China) isn't an argument for other nations not doing so.

> Meanwhile, I can't remember a covert operation done by China

There have been a few big ones that became public against western targets, e.g.:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/p...

https://gizmodo.com/report-chinese-hack-of-federal-employmen...

But many of the rest have been concealed by the victims to protect business interests with China, which is why you haven't heard about them:

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/711779130/as-china-hacked-u-s...

> I can't remember a covert operation done by China

Why would you expect to? Have you been watching for them? Are you privy to information the rest of us don't have? They are covert after all. "I don't remember" says more about your perception than about the underlying reality. As others have pointed out, there are many known instances of Chinese malfeasance, mostly around misappropriation of military secrets. There are surely some unknown as well.

> I can't help thinking of either racism, or...

Again, more to do with your perception than the underlying reality. That those are the first explanations you grasp for says nothing about whether they're the right ones.

> Russia is doing obviously hostile acts

Ok, here’s the deal. Ukraine had Russia as the biggest trade partner before 2014. Several companies were owned by Russians: banks, communication providers etc. and millions of Ukrainians working in Russia. Now, when 2014 comes, the armed thugs get their hands on automatic weapons and overthrow the government. And the new government is not just “not pro-Russian”, but actively anti-Russian with all the consequences for Russian capital which has been invested in Ukraine. I mean, you had to be in Kiev in 2014 to see what was going on. So saying Russia was unreasonably hostile towards Ukraine...that’s just being naïve.

Russia invaded Ukraine. If you don’t like the new democratically elected government in a nation you can’t invade them.

I agree with your basic point, but... 2014 wasn't democracy in action. It was a revolution.

It wasn’t democratically elected, Yanukovych has been overthrown.

He was a Russian shill put there illegally.

China is currently the conservative foe of choice and Russia the ally of choice. We'll likely see this flip now that centrists are taking power since they were all-in on Russia as a foe over the past few years. Russian intelligence doesn't necessarily have to be a part of the picture, though we've certainly had cases of politicians taking foreign money.

It's hard to say how much of it is motivated by racism, though it's certainly a part of it. When pols call COVID-19 "the China virus" and talk about making them pay for it there's obviously a grudge there.

> When pols call COVID-19 "the China virus" and talk about making them pay for it there's obviously a grudge there.

Are you sure that's ethnically rooted, or that they're trying to describe the CCP and simply chose the wrong title?

A number of people calling it the "China virus" redubbed it the "CCP virus".

You can be angry at Chinese leadership while empathizing and supporting its people.

Russia is by no means an ally. Not politically, economically or diplomatically. What are you talking about?

It does seem Russia is seen as a potential partner in "containing" China.

That’s absolutely not the current geopolitical situation.

Lindsey Graham was very much publicly against Trump, then news came out his email was hacked by Russia, and soon after his stance turned 180 degrees. It's all coincidental but there are just too many coincidences to disregard it.

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