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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

It's fair play to act like any gov is doing this.

E.G: Microsoft being American (and them being part of PRISM), I just assume the OS has a backdoor for the US gov. Now with Windows 10 heavy telemetry, it's even easier.

I work for a client doing chips for credit cards. Did you know they are now full blown computers that can run a light version of Java (Java Card) ? The company is building their own hardware and software, and just to get to a conference room, you need biometric access + badge + pin code. Pretty sure they send data to my country agencies in some way despite having to trick the banking system to do so for them.

Same from any software, server/cloud hosting or hardware. If it comes from a specific country, this country is most probably using it for intelligence. It doesn't even need to be on a network now, because there is so much interactivity with all devices. And eventually, one will be.

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It's pretty absurd to both sides something like this. Do you have evidence that the US government is doing this on computers it sells overseas, or is this just magical speculation?

I heard your type of argument about the US mass spying before Snowden, and surprise, we were not conspirationists after all.

So call that educated magical speculation.

Well, but correct me if I'm wrong, the Snowden leak included nothing like this. Instead it included a lot of things that would be a lot easier to do if Google/Microsoft ect just gave them access. The very fact they had to do everything else is at least evidence that don't have direct access

It's just different use cases. Backdoors are more useful for targetted operations or specific data exfiltration, while plugging yourself to back bones is more useful for mass surveillance.

I don't even see why it's controversial to hold this opinion. Reading some comments, people seems to feel offended we could think that from the USA.

If anything, the USA are, with Russia and China, among the countries anybody in Europe like me would suspect the most about pulling things like this. The CIA and NSA have a terrible reputation, and the track record to support it.

We are talking about a country that went to war while lying about WMD against the UN vote, made money with south american cocaine while organizing coup after coup, elected Bush and Trump yet punished Chelsea Manning. A country that is still under the temporary 9/11 Patriot act, it used to mass spy on its entire population.

Of course I'm assuming the worse from them.

And yes, it's fair.

Actually, even if I were proven to be completely wrong in 10 years, it still would have been fair.

But I'm not even assuming that only from the US, but basically from any gov, including mine. Because history taught us that's what power does.

It's sane to be suspicious of people in power. Necessary for democracy, even.

But, and this is where the equivalency annoys me. You could literally end up in jail for saying some of these things about China in China. You could just as well talked about abuses of women and the me to movement, but the reason that hasn't happened in China may well be not that there men are somehow better behaved, but that they appear to have put a women who did come out with an accusation under house arrest until she agreed to stop talking about it. Yes the US has done and doubtless continues to do bad things, part of that comes just from having power which the US has had for a long time, part of that comes from truly bad people ect. But the Snowden leak happened in the US. US newspapers reported on it. College professors talked to their class about it. You can talk about it on this US hosted and owned website. None of that is true in China, right? So yes I am more skeptical of the US doing shady business when a large percentage of US citizens object to shady business and can talk about it than I am of China doing shady stuff when they've built their internet to insulate their government from as much criticism as possible

Yes, cancer is worse than diabetes.

Not the point.

The point of my comment is: I assume any gov to have such backdoor if they can.

Well, but we can assume with different probabilities. For sure there are people in every government who would if they could, but the fact that the US has mechanisms to expose this sort of thing and lots of people in individual companies who feel like you and there are still no stories of this, that is evidence that it isn't happening at least not at any sort of scale

> It's just different use cases.

That's a hand-wavy redirection that isn't relevant to the issue at hand, which is that:

There is no evidence of the US (and, in fact, many other large countries, with exceptions for e.g. Israel) installing backdoors and breaking into computers in order to steal intellectual property.

There is ample evidence of China doing exactly that, against a variety of targets (not just the US - they've taken things from Japan and the EU, among many others).

I wouldn't be surprised if every nation with a functioning Internet connection tries to put the hac on whatever they can.

But that's not the topic under discussions - the topic is stealing and commercializing IP, for which there is tons of evidence for China doing, and accusations of e.g. the Five-Eyes doing it are rampant speculation with absolutely no evidence included.

Yes, that includes your comment.

I never said I had evidence, I said it was fair play to speculate all gov do the same, given they lack of morale and fire power.

Which it is.

I suppose it's true that you said "speculate", because one can speculate that the sky is green when you're not looking - speculation doesn't necessarily have anything to do with reality. Fair enough.

People have a hard time admitting that what Snowden/Assange revealed about the US is much more damning, from infected servers to keyloggers built into USB cables.

I find China is useful as a mirror to the US. If they are doing something problematic, it's highly likely the US gov is too but just hasn't disclosed it to the public.

> I find China is useful as a mirror to the US. If they are doing something problematic, it's highly likely the US gov is too but just hasn't disclosed it to the public.

You think the US is engaging in systematic genocide? I'm guessing not. If so, you should consider why you would say something so ridiculously out of step with reality.

Well, let's count how many people the USA killed with 2 wars in Irak, one in Afghanistan, one in Vietnam and countless operations in South America. Or how they mostly put non white people in a privatized prison system that then exploit them. Or how their police is so peaceful and close to the population the entire country had a debate about de-funding it.

Sure, China is worse, but it does make a useful mirror. Like Russia was a useful one during the cold war.

Seems my reply was possibly too on the nose of got flagged. Hopefully, you read it before it was removed.

*and

The first DDG result, there are many.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...

I'm a Brazilian, the NSA has been caught breaking Microsoft products on our largest companies for industrial spying too.

Around the time of the snowden leaks we learned that the NSA was installing backdoors on Cisco firewalls bound for foreign countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Systems#Firewall_backdoo...

"A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide details how the agency's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert firmware onto them before they are delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being "some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world."

Where's the part where the US steals and then commercializes Chinese IP?

My original comment doesn't focus on the stealing IP part, only on the backdooring part.

Not precisely the same thing, but even more insidious (or brilliant, depending on who you ask):

> Operation Rubicon (German: Operation Rubikon), until the late 1980s called Operation Thesaurus, was a secret operation by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), lasting from 1970 to 1993 and 2018, respectively, to gather communication intelligence of encrypted government communications of other countries.[1][2] This was accomplished through the sale of manipulated encryption technology (CX-52) from Swiss-based Crypto AG, which was secretly owned and influenced by the two services from 1970 onwards.[1] In a comprehensive CIA historical account of the operation leaked in early 2020, it was referred to as the "intelligence coup of the century" in a Washington Post article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon_(Crypto_AG)

It’s not “fair play” to equate your assumptions and personal conspiracies to thousands of documented cases of state sponsored IP theft.

Yeah, I read those kind of comments before.

But then again, we got a PRISM, XKeyscore or NSO Pegasus coming out of the box every other year. So I stand by "fair play" to qualify my assumptions.

> Yeah, I read those kind of comments before.

Just pointing it out: this is a really sneaky way to avoid providing any sort of evidence for your claims whatsoever.

But to address your claim: security and cyber attack stuff are not remotely comparable to IP theft. You'll have to do better than literally pull claims out of thin air.

And, exactly none of those incidents you mentioned have anything to do with IP theft. Your own examples demonstrate a consistent pattern of no IP theft.

I don't need evidence since from the beginning I'm insisting that it's my own assumption.

That's how assumptions work.

And I'm not focused at all on the IP theft, only on the backdooring.

People just started to focus on IP and the USA after the fact, because americans think the USA and money are the center of the world and see it everywhere even when they are not the main point of the conversation, but just examples.

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