Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

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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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