I'm reading that the UK government is spying on us, and their retrospective plausible excuse is that they are scanning web servers for, erm, vulnerabilities.
No, I don't think that the government is here to help. It allows itself only to maintain force, that it then uses to forcibly extract wealth from its herd, er, sorry citizens.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/1...
Downvoting "It's raining because Soros and his globalist Jewish cabal control the weather" does not mean I disagree that it's raining but the edit always comes in [downvoters can't handle the TRUTH, stay classy HN] or similar.
e.g. how is scanning for vulnerabilities "spying on us"? How is scanning for vulerabilities "forcibly extracting wealth"? How is informing people of vulernabilities "not here to help"? It's a thinly disguised flamewar comment, not a comment on the topic.
To play Devil's advocate: once you discover a vulnerability you always have two options: report it and have it fixed, or exploit it for your own gain. You charitably assume that government is somehow obligated to chose the former, while in reality in some cases it might choose the latter.
This assumes that the government that wants to compromise a domestic host can't do it in a way that is a lot more deniable than porting scanning you from a gov owned IP range.
If the government wants to find and exploit a vulnerability they likely will find a way they don't need some loose cover story for it.