The problem with this kind of Mad Libs argument is that it falsely implies the substitutions are equivalent when they're not. Also your quote shears away the context of the original statement that made it meaningful.
Of course there is, but as this thread is trying to point out, that "little truth" is completely insufficient when assessing risk. The degree to which a particular government can interfere with companies headquartered there matters. The legal culture in those countries matter. The ability to contest and redress this interference matters. An estimate of the worst that can happen to an individual who resists this interference matters.
I'm a US citizen living in the US, so I'm certainly biased, but I do believe my data (and my person, and if I ran a company, my company too) is much safer being in the US than in Russia.
It's certain that all major world powers engage in various forms of cyber warfare. It's completely expected that countries (and companies within them) that are allied will (most of the time) not expose other allies for cyber attacks and malware distribution. It's also completely expected that antagonistic countries (and their companies) will do so.
Back to the point of this article: of course Kaspersky is a US national security threat, precisely because it (as a Russian entity) will try to expose the US government's cyber warfare capabilities. Whether or not Kaspersky is a threat to the cybersecurity of individuals in the West isn't the issue here. (I would expect they probably are, to some extent, though!)
You talk about assessing risk, but we know from the Snowden leaks that the risk in this matter in the US approaches 100% as the size of your company increase. What degree of risk is higher than 100%?
I still have a serious and (since Russia-started a war in Ukraine) permanent problem with him - as pointed elsewhere [1] he went through KGB school - voluntarily, he was actually active KGB intelligence just like Putin. At those places, your objective morals go down the drain very fast and for good. And obviously both are still very close, he approves overall totalitarian direction of Russia and often spoke against 'too much freedom' in the west and on internet.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140423055434/http://www.wired....
Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law.
Nobody is perfect at any of these. But if the FSB wants a code change in Kaspersky, they're getting that code change. There is no independent press to report it. No opposition incentivized to call them out on it. No court in which they could lose.
> Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law.
Exactly. Mad-libs "arguments" typically boil down to an invitation to ignore salient differences (which the structure cannot call attention to), make a superficial comparison, and finally arrive at a false equivalency.
The US is not some monolithic entity. It's almost weirdly schizophrenic. Yes, the government will e.g. use some super-shaky legal arguments to justify torture ahem "enhanced interrogation", but on the other hand Freedom of Information Act requests still get processed. Yes, the NSA will spy on US citizens, but even they feel the need to come up with some legalistic / procedural cover.
Even as the US's checks and balances are tested, and structural inequalities are examined, there is a broad and deep tradition of fighting the government and not going to jail like Navalny.
The traditions and norms of a country's populace, and its institutions really really matter, especially when their institutions are being tested.
Corruption is everywhere, but this is too simplistic a pattern-match.
EDIT> Knight-Ridder did some fantastic and courageous investigative journalism debunking the US casus belli in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion. It didn't stop the invasion, but they were recognized later. Can we imagine that happening in Russia?
This type of thing is something I wish people would recognize more. In Russia right now, the simple act of participating in a peaceful protest against the war in Ukraine could easily land you in jail. While the US government has at times had a sketchy anti-protest track record, can we really imagine the US federal government attempting to pass a law today that makes it a jail-able offense to speak out against a US military action? (Hint: the answer is, unequivocally, no.)
It's even worse than that: merely calling a war a war can land you in jail:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/crisis-in-ukraine-to-russia-it-...:
> Russia insists that it is not at “war” in Ukraine, instead referring to its violent campaign as a “special military operation.” Under a harsh new law, Russians now face up to 15 years in prison if they spread “fake” reports and call the conflict what it is: a “war” and “invasion.”
I agree with you.
> Knight-Ridder did some fantastic and courageous investigative journalism debunking the US casus belli in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion. It didn't stop the invasion, but they were recognized later. Can we imagine that happening in Russia?
Thanks I’ll check it out
Guess the 98% Federal conviction rate isn’t accounted for when talking about the deep tradition of citizens fighting the government.
Personal opinion, all governments are corrupt, including the US
All governments are corrupt, but is it remotely plausible they are equally corrupt? Are they not comparable?
Also, as an American Citizen, who has more power to put me the individual in a cage, the FSB or NSA?
I dont believe the NSA, CIA or even the FBI really have any actual legal limits.
Any metric you and I would like to use, yes. The govt of Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of ours, murders journalists with a chainsaw on a foreign soil and smuggles the body out of the host country in suitcases - yet no Saudi company is penalized. Supporting a proxy war in Yemen is not that different from Russian invasion, but somehow it suffers no consequences for doing so.
It's actually easy to justify: for the vast majority of Saudis prince MBS is a good ruler. Who are we to judge how their government works, given completely different cultural backgrounds, religions, and different expectations resulting from that difference? We'd be happier if Saudi Arabia was a democracy with a rule of law instead of chainsaw, but if the majority of Saudis prefer the latter, we shouldn't try to force them to change, even if homosexuals can be legally stoned to death there.
It's an easy argument, but it undermines the "objectively" part of your statement. If we accept MBS, we should accept Putin. If we don't accept the way SA works, as we don't accept Russia's, then we should not trade with the Saudis. We do trade with them, though - we (Poland) even increased (2x or more) the amount of oil imported from them this year, and they continue being our friends and valuable allies in the region.
The situation is frankly schizophrenic. Either there are objective metrics, in which case they should be applied everywhere equally, or we allow Saudis do what they want, but then we have no grounds on which to condemn Putin.
If we want to still stay close to Saudi Arabia and condemn Putin, we have to agree that we condemn Putin based on something else than objective standards of governing.
I'd really like for our foreign policies to stay true to the ideals we hold dear, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Putin is an actual, real threat, so we don't accept him and his buddies, while MBS only dismembers his own citizens (and he even allowed women to drive!), so we accept him. That's also a kind of "objective metric", but it's far from what you meant, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable TBH.