Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia)
You should have the same concerns about software from anywhere, including the US. I believe it's a couple orders of magnitude more likely I'd be harmed by Russian government malicious code than any other nation.
Russia is in crisis, striking indiscriminately, and has no reputation left to lose. So that's where my concern lies.
With wikileaks, we've seen, that americans did all of the same things, you now try to accuse russia of potentialy doing.
I'm not saying russians won't do it, but americans already did it.
In finance I had a client that didn't trust any vendor and asked me to reverse engineer VPN appliances (they negotiate a special clause with the vendor), which makes more sense then trusting based on country of origin.
But we're talking about a government that just stole hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign planes (and other equipment) and took down satellite radio networks with cyberattacks (causing a lot of collateral damage), recently backdoor'd thousands of companies via Solarwinds, and looked the other way w/r/t ransomware groups until one of them caused a major international incident (Colonial pipeline). The threat from other nations is a lot more theoretical than it is for Russia.
Just call the "other guys" terrorists, nazis, whatever, and americans can occupy and bomb whatever country they want (and they did that to many countries) withot any backlash. Gone are the days of the hippies and anti-war-anything... sadly.
I was kinda hoping for a "revolution" in one of the european countries (eg france) during covid, where people would "remove" the current government, and make the other governments atleast worry a bit when their people get mad... but sadly, not even that.
Those are not the actions of the state worried about public perception, except in a "silence the dissidents" sense.
I'm American. My country is the US. Yes, they're spying on me. Yes, they do naughty things. But I assume that at the end of the day, the US has my interests at heart more than China does. Or the UK, or Russia, or Turkey, or anyone else. I happen to live on the land that they'll protect even while filling their pockets.
My feedback to you would be to do the same. You don't have to trust your own government but assume your government will keep you around longer than any other government will.
I'd much prefer misdeeds that don't affect me from a government that doesn't care about me, than those of a local government who wants to keep me alive for the purposes of doing more bad things to me in the future
I'm not, so from that point of view US companies cannot offer many guarantees to me
Theoretically, the Constitution protects you. In reality, the intelligence community acts largely in secret, and there's very little preventing them from violating the Bill of Rights. Citizens don't even know what rights they've given up until someone like Snowden spills the beans.
But you turned this question into comparing US to perfection. Yes, you are right. US is not perfection.
But there is a big difference between 70 to 10, even both are not 100.
What Snowden revealed does not make 70 to 10. If you think that way, you don’t understand how bad an authoritarian regime is.
Even if a company does not want to participate or is not compelled to do so, the US government has very significant capacity to break into and co-opt systems (all the way from targeted surveillance of individuals by intercepting and bugging hardware to tapping undersea cables to indiscriminately hoover up communications).
So when people say that Kaspersky might be forced to go along with Russian intelligence, the same goes for American tech companies and US intelligence. There is indeed a 4th Amendment that is supposed to protect Americans, but the last two decades have shown that the government is perfectly willing to ignore that legal restriction.
The US has the most extensive global surveillance system in the world. US intelligence services receive about as much funding as the entire Russian military. I have no doubt that Russia tries very hard to engage in extensive foreign surveillance, but its not in the same league as the US.
* The NSA secretly obtained access to every Verizon customer's entire call log. This was blatantly illegal (the 4th Amendment forbids general warrants), and it only came to light because of Snowden's leaks.[0]
* Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, was compelled to install a backdoor that allowed the US government to read the emails of all of the provider's users. The process was supposed to be secret: the company was under a gag order. The public only found out because the founder spoke out.[1]
There are many examples like this from the US (just look up "National Security Letter," or take a look at Snowden's leaks). You're citing one example in which a company successfully refused a request, but we also know from Snowden that there was mass collection on most Americans that went on for years in secret, despite the fact that it was blatantly illegal.
The scale of surveillance conducted globally by US intelligence agencies is unparalleled. I'm sure Russia wishes it could collect information on the same scale, but it simply does not have the ability to do so.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/why-di...
Illegal NSA dragnets and perjury in front of Congress notwithstanding.
Could the Russian press behave toward Putin as the US press toward Trump? If so, then you can have your 10s.
Of course lawyers working for these agencies will try to justify them. That's what they're paid to do. During the Bush Jr. years, lawyers for the administration also argued that torture was legal, despite the fact that it's blatantly illegal.
Nevertheless, these programs are incredibly difficult to challenge in court, because the secrecy surrounding them makes even proving standing nearly impossible.
As for the (un)constitutionality of mass collection of Americans' call records, here's what Reuters[0] says:
> In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
The court did not make any ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program, but they wrote in their decision that it very likely was Unconstitutional.[1]
Historically speaking, this NSA program is exactly the type of search that the 4th Amendment was intended to prevent. Americans were upset about "writs of assistance" that gave colonial officials wide powers to conduct searches against classes of people. That's why the 4th Amendment requires warrants to be specific and limited in scope. Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional, and is exactly the sort of thing the 4th Amendment was intended to put a stop to.
0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T...
1. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/1...
XKeystore is simply the database that stores data collected outside the US, and Tempora is not even a US program, so clearly neither can violate the 4th Amendment, which is why no lawsuits were brought against either program.
> Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional.
Obviously not. The program was limited to collecting millions of call logs instead of all call logs after the leaks, and that was considered so obviously constitutional that nobody sued. [5]
[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DqqNh3fnfGCY1Zmk41LsSnjgUBg=...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/07/us/comparing-t...
[4] https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-surveillance/sp...
> Tempora is not even a US program, so clearly neither can violate the 4th Amendment
The NSA is a partner in the program (led by the British, with whom the US has a very close intelligence partnership). The program does bulk collection on undersea cables which do carry Americans' data. This is prima facie a violation of the 4th Amendment.
> which is why no lawsuits were brought against either program
The reason why lawsuits so rarely get anywhere against any of these mass surveillance programs is that in the US legal system, you have to be able to prove standing in order to challenge them. The US isn't like other systems with dedicated constitutional courts that can review laws on their own initiative. Someone has to be able to show that they themselves have been specifically harmed. Unless you can prove that the NSA specifically looked at your data and used it against you in some way, you can't challenge the NSA's surveillance. By the very nature of these programs, it's nearly impossible for anyone to prove that.
> The New York Times [2][3] and CNET [4] subsequently correctly described the program
The NY Times article you cite describes it as a program that collects information from the largest US tech companies on the basis of FISA requests. Just so you recall, FISA is a court that operates in secret, that grants virtually all requests, and that has demonstrably signed off on Unconstitutional bulk surveillance (e.g., mass collection of call logs).
And by the way, the type of behavior we're discussing here, which we know for a fact the US government has engaged in, is exactly what people in this thread are alleging the Russian government might theoretically do to Kaspersky.
> High school dropout Snowden
Yes, a "high school dropout" who was paid 200 grand a year and given access to the NSA's classified networks. What a dummy!
> The program was limited to collecting millions of call logs instead of all call logs after the leaks, and that was considered so obviously constitutional that nobody sued.
This is not how the process of challenging an Unconstitutional law works. You can't just say, "That's Unconstitutional" and then sue. You have to show that you have personally been targeted. That's why Rosa Parks had to physically sit down on the bus and wait to get thrown off. That's what gave her standing to challenge Montgomery's segregated bus system. Just knowing that a surveillance program exists and has probably illegally collected your information does not automatically give you the ability to challenge said program in court.
Bulk collection of records of millions of Americans (this is just the warrant that we know of, and there were almost certainly similar warrants covering most Americans, because by design, the program was meant to do bulk analysis of all call records) is obviously unconstitutional, but also very difficult to legally challenge.
The NSA is aware of the program but has no say in implementing it and doesn't have access to its data. Only the UK has the data and gets to choose who to share what they've learned from it to. This is clearly not a violation of the 4th Amendment, which is why nobody has sued the US government for it. If you believe it is a violation, go ahead and try to find a lawyer to take your case.
> The reason why lawsuits so rarely get anywhere...
No lawsuit was brought at all against XKeyscore or Tempora. That is the reason they didn't get anywhere. Lawsuits were brought against the phone metadata program, which succeeded, and against PRISM, which was thrown out because it didn't collect the data of the person who brought the lawsuit, unlike what Snowden and Greenwald erroneously claimed.
> Just so you recall, FISA is a court that operates in secret, that grants virtually all requests, and that has demonstrably signed off on Unconstitutional bulk surveillance
Once again, no program the court has signed off on has been ruled unconstitutional. Just so you recall, FISA is not a court but a law. FISC is the court that rules on FISA requests.
> And by the way, the type of behavior we're discussing here, which we know for a fact the US government has engaged in, is exactly what people in this thread are alleging the Russian government might theoretically do to Kaspersky.
The behavior we're alleging the Russian government could do with Kaspersky is putting malware in its software. We know the US government has done this for hardware exported overseas, which is why we are right to expect Russia to do this. We also know that Russia engages in dragnet domestic surveillance, which is something you're alleging that the US does, but there is no evidence of.
> Yes, a "high school dropout" who was paid 200 grand a year and given access to the NSA's classified networks. What a dummy!
He was a Sharepoint admin earning $122k. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/06/.... His hilarious misinterpretation of PRISM and other programs proves what a dummy he is. The fact that he dropped out of high school just explains how he came to be so stupid, and it should have been a signal for you to read the documents he leaked instead of expecting him to interpret them correctly for you.
> Bulk collection of records of millions of Americans (this is just the warrant that we know of, and there were almost certainly similar warrants covering most Americans, because by design, the program was meant to do bulk analysis of all call records) is obviously unconstitutional, but also very difficult to legally challenge.
They just have to have reason to believe their data is being collected to challenge it, as they did in Klayman v. Obama I. The conclusion was that the bulk collection of everybody's call records wasn't justified by the law, with no ruling on the constitutionality, possibly because there was precedent in Smith v. Maryland that it is constitutional (the very opposite of "obviously unconstitutional"). After that, Congress passed a law that allowed collection of millions of call records, and that was not even challenged.
I think Russia is using similar tactics, does it?
You have to say "Ukrainian Special Security Operation".
>Moscow attacked neighboring Ukraine last month, following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.
>Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military alliance. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine.
Internal newspapers, such as Novaya Gazeta, have been shut down for saying "war" in print. Just the latest in many papers, radio channels and more that have been silenced in Russia.
> It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine.
They didn't use the word "war".
Bullshit. The US is an imperialist, sometimes oppressive pseudo-democracy, but nothing like that mafia-run kleptocracy.
Most of the world consideres americans the "bad guys", and a lot worse than the russians. You can start with southern america and middle east. Then the balkans (where putin is doing the same as you guys did with kosovo). Even parts of africa would have a say.
Here in the balkans, people were actively rooting for trump in the last two elections, because they were afraid Hillary would start a new war here...
> Most of the world consideres americans the "bad guys", and a lot worse than the russians. You can start with southern america and middle east.
Their absurd support for tin pot dictators in South America was and is reprehensible, and the whole Iraq war was morally bankrupt and threw fuel on a fire that we’ll be trying to put out for decades. And yet, nothing the American did in the Middle East came anywhere near Aleppo or Mariupol. Or the Holodomor. Or the Prague spring.
> Then the balkans (where putin is doing the same as you guys did with kosovo).
Come on, now. You cannot possibly compare Sarajevo (with an actual genocide being carried out, surprisingly, by the side with Russian support) with the charade Putin used as a fig leaf to invade Ukraine. This is pure propaganda. The region would not be any better today had the ethnically cleansing gone all the way to the end, quite the contrary. Europe should have had grown a spine and actually done something.
> Here in the balkans, people were actively rooting for trump in the last two elections, because they were afraid Hillary would start a new war here...
Well, maybe you did, but that’s not what I heard from my greek friends. The Americans are not complicated to understand, they are going where their interests are. What the hell would they do in the Balkans? That is just stupid.
Yeah sure... and iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and iraqi soldiers killed babies, and afghanistan had to be occupied for 20 years, because a few saudis flew a few planes into a few buildings. Plus syria, libya, lebanon etc... and considering how far back you go in history, there's also blood from vietnam on americans hand. And it's funny how it's a "beloved ruler" when it's a friend of america and "nasty dictator" when it's not... so america has to replace the ones they don't like (eg iran.)
Sarajevo is not in kosovo, quite a few years were between sarajevo and the bombing of yugoslavia/serbia. Kosovo albanians wanted to separate from the main country, and the main country (yugoslavia then) wouldn't let them... then they formed armed groups that attacked the serbs, and serbs attacked the albanians... basically the same thing that was happening with the russian minority in eg. donbas and lugansk in ukraine. Then someone (USA) had some geopolicital interests in the balkans, bombed the country for 78 days, bombed hospitals, passenger trains, busses, schools, tv stations, cluster bombed a few cities, bridges, roads, highways etc, and built a nato base in kosovo.
So, why have a base in the balkans, if they don't need it?
Yeah if the US ever goes rogue we're all doomed but then your antivirus software will be the least of your worries.