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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

The snark is unwarranted. The US has far more political, economic, and military power than any other country. Stands to reason that more is expected from them especially when "morality", "freedom", "rights", "doing the right thing" etc. seem to be the publicly stated cornerstones of most US initiatives. Do you think Denmark putting something on a blacklist will have anywhere near the same effect?

Also your question is rarely asked when the US is doing something... questionable but certainly to their advantage when the rest of the world didn't do. It seems unfair to bring up the "whatabout" argument only when you feel insulted especially since it's not a strong defense to begin with, it's even weaker in this particular case.

If you can do the right thing but decide to put your morals to sleep for as long as it's advantageous to you, then any positive spin (like protecting "the rules-based international order") is just a spin.

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America prosecutes American hackers who hack foreign nationals. This already gives them the moral high ground over their peers. See: Russian ransomware gangs that are de facto state sponsored. Cyberspace is a new frontier that wasn't built to conform to your sense of right and wrong.

>questionable but certainly to their advantage when the rest of the world didn't do

They would if they could.

>America prosecutes American hackers who hack foreign nationals

America prosecutes the NSA? :-D

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Was this supposed to be a funny joke?

You're being intentionally obtuse. The only country which actively spies on pretty much everyone in the world is the US, via the NSA. And the NSA is the very definition of "state sponsored". In effect the US is running the largest state sponsored hacking programme that the world has ever seen. So who did the US prosecute for that?

> America prosecutes American hackers who hack foreign nationals

To this day the only person connected to US state sponsored hacking who was prosecuted is Edward Snowden, the guy who blew the whistle on said program. That says everything about the situation. The US is hacking everything that can be hacked, then floods western media with reports of Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and North Korean state sponsored hacks.

> They would if they could.

"Solid" defense there. The kind of argument the Mafia would use as a defense, which just happens to be really unprovable.

>The only country which actively spies on pretty much everyone in the world is the US

Why are you sure about that? I think Sunburst burned everyone.

There might be a subtle difference here not captured by just labelling all this under the umbrella term "hacking". The American government typically exploits devices for gathering information for authorized espionage, which is something that every country on earth conducts. Russian gangs infect hospitals and water treatment facilities with ransomware. The latter has something we might call "kinetic effects" and is closer to all out cyber war.

We don’t know what the American government does. We know (some of) what it’s done in the past, and thus we can safely assume it’s up to no good.

This is the genetic fallacy, no? Americans are bad, so they must be hacking hospitals even though we can't see it.

Even ignoring the fact that US doesn't need to hack hospitals, they just declare sanctions to prevent given country from receiving medical supplies...

How do we know various attacks come from Russia, and not from US? Mostly because the US says so.

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