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Comment by leftcenterright | Hacker News Reader

This does not surprise me at all. I worked in Italy for 2 years and in Germany for 4 years. A sense of `US/CIA/NSA-phobia` is strong among many companies and is often used to justify not using US datacenters, cloud-services and SaaS tools. I have to admit I do not fully understand it, but I am inclined to think it is mostly a bias and not driven by actual risk assessments. Having conducted risk assessments and threat analysis myself for various companies with a global presence, I was most intrigued by this phenomenon in the EU as it was mostly not driven by technical accuracy.

In my experience, very few companies in the EU actually care about innovation and lack world-class engineers.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_EU

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Phobia is defined as an irrational fear. Before PRISM, you could argue the fear was indeed irrational (although the writings were on the wall), but now?

Of course, for a company that's a numbers game. For private citizens or the general public, especially in countries with a history like Germany or Italy, it's not.

I think it boiled down mostly to fear of being compromised by the CIA/NSA vs fear of being compromised by a mildly competent attacker while using an insecure "Made in EU" provider. Practically speaking: the first one winning against the latter is really of no use.

As a former European supplier for US companies myself, now part of a "Made in EU" company, being friends with enough European engineers I regard highly, I must admit I'm not impartial to that topic.

We just don't want to freely give our data to US competitors companies. Is that hard to understand ? Do you think US company would reveal their blueprints and source code to the rest of the world ?

A phobia is an irrational fear, this is a rational fear.

About how EU treat engineers, this is a separate issue, in France at least, there is the belief that advancing in your career (=get paid more) means becoming manager.

It is not hard to understand, I am all for it. Please see my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35392323

I think for career advancement, getting paid more is not the only motivation for a lot of world class engineers. Innovatio itself is sometimes sufficient.

The phobia sounds like a feature, not a bug. But could you explain more of what you mean by,

> Having conducted risk assessments and threat analysis myself for various companies with a global presence, I was most intrigued by this phenomenon in the EU as it was mostly not driven by technical accuracy.

A risk assessment and threat analysis typically requires a definition of who the adversary is and what the risk of using any service is in regard to that adversary.

Reasons I heard for a lot of companies to not use GCP/AWS/Github simply were: It is a US company, it will be very easy for CIA to retrieve that data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) or poison the service, let's use XYZ local provider.

And the ironic thing is that these local providers had either a terrible reliability record or poor security posture so a mildly competent mediocre hacker would be able to compromise the data which is being defended against CIA. Not once in tens of engagements I came across a calculated measure of defending against nation-state vs run-of-the-mill malware.

Rediculous American centric, typical ignorant view of the 500 million people and 30+ seperate countries in Europe

It is well documented that the CIA heavily influenced elections in Italy after ww2, especially in 1948 when they supported the Christian Democrats in opposition to communism. It’s not the Cold War anymore, but I’m sure this part of their history is a factor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Italian_general_electio...

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