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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered what the US would do if China started flying sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace. Or if Americans discovered that the Chinese had interception equipment in critical telecom switching stations throughout the world that allowed them to divert America's commercial and governmental communications to Chinese supercomputers for decryption.

There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

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There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

I have to call bullshit on this, sorry.

The Russians did this sort of thing all the time during the cold war: parking nuclear submarines off the East Coast, flying bomber runs along the border, reconnaissance -- the list goes on and on. On both sides. There was never an "act of war" Even the Cuban Missile Crisis (which did not have mutants, by the way) ended peacefully.

Look, I think it's great to point out there are two sides of every story. But this type of statement goes beyond a simple plea for "take a look at the other side, guys" and heads into propaganda territory, i.e. everything is mostly the same. So I had to call you on it. Let's not go there.

Why? Because this is a good topic. It calls into question the intersection of governments, technology, and rule of law. The whole point of the article is destroyed if you just say it's all the same. It's not.

Every bad thing in the world can't be erased by an over-application of equivocation. That kind of thing is for spinners. We head down this road next you'll be telling me that China owns vast hunks of ocean and various islands that everybody else says they don't.

Nations unfortunately engage in a lot of belligerant actions that can easily spiral out of control. The long term risk with the USA conducting operations in international waters around China - which they are perfectly entitled to do so - is that areas of contested territory such as the Spratly islands in the South China Sea could easily become flashpoints for needless conflict.

It is a flashpoint irrespective of whether we're there. That area has been contested for years. It's not belligerence on our part to attempt to maintain order.

There are a lot of things that America does to Americans that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

If you really want to compare, than take Taiwan. An island just off the coast that China claims should be under its control and than is currently not. Same situation as Cuba a few decated ago, the US delivers all kinds of arms and military knowledge and China is not happy about it.

Not the same thing at all, since the US never claims Cuba should be part of Florida.

Actually, the US did own Cuba for a little tiny while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1898)

and there actually was a war involved.

Cuba was explicitly given up by Spain to be occupied, but explicitly not annexed, by the United States because of the Teller Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller_Amendment). Thus, while the US may have governed Cuba at one time, it never owned it.

> the US never claims Cuba should be part of Florida

In a way, it does.

Consider: if Cuba were to become a capitalist country, how much of its land and other natural resources would be immediately purchased by US nationals?

Americans can take de-facto ownership of foreign countries without re-coloring any maps.

Well, US nationals of Cuban extraction, from Miami, who always wanted to go back there. But you might as well say that Britain claims to own Spain from the number of Brits who retire there.

There are a lot of things that America does to other countries that would be taken as acts of war if they were done to America.

Is this the foreshadowing of a second Cold War, albeit with a different super power and in completely new battlefields? The only problem, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread is that unlike conventional warfare, spoofing the origin of these "weapons" is relatively easy.

Does anyone know of whether people have thought of things like Mutually Assured Destruction in the context of e-commerce and the internet?

When thinking about mutually assured destruction on the internet, somehow Anonymous and LulzSec come to mind...

Or if Americans discovered that the Chinese had interception equipment in critical telecom switching stations throughout the world that allowed them to divert America's commercial and governmental communications to Chinese supercomputers for decryption.

Based on the way the American IC reacts, we already believe they do this quite broadly. It's called Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. http://www.huawei.com/en/

I've always wondered what the US would do if China started flying sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace.

Probably about what the United States did for decades when the Soviet Union fly sigint surveillance planes along the edge of US territorial airspace. That is, just fly its own planes in international airspace, which has been its practice for a long time. "National means of verification" are what make arms control treaties and other confidence-building measures between nations work.

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