U.S. halts offensive cyber operations against Moscow | Hacker News Reader

U.S. halts offensive cyber operations against Moscow

washingtonpost.com

100 pointsgeox11 comments

One assumes there is at least some mutuality here, and that Russia has also indicated it's standing down offensive ops? Some basic bilaterality? Christmas truce in the trenches?

One also assumes covert infiltration a la "salt typhoon" continues at scale everywhere. I am somewhat amazed other economies haven't declared their infection state, although we are somewhat acculturated to both assuming we're not sufficiently valuable, and have different core ISP/Telco technology models so maybe it's a little different. Baby Bells gotta be what they are.

Any economy which has a baby bell externally supplied systems network management model would want to worry.

(This is said in a belief the primary break-in target is Telco management networks.)

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That's what people say about the US here in Russia. Don't you think this kind of thinking is a dead end?

It's entirely probable both groups of citizens are correct and that neither nation can be trusted to not infiltrate the infrastructure of the other.

Interests of power are not always aligned with those of majority of citizens. In both there is very high misalignment now.

World still lacks political systems that align leadership representation with citizen interest.

A lot of it stems from justified, systemic mistrust, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat

The road to perestroika and glasnost hit a dead end a loooooong time ago. Global diplomatic reform simply isn't possible with a Putin administration in control of Russia. They refuse to honor their word and therefore are impossible to negotiate with on good-faith terms.

It's not just that. The Russian "government", that is, the mafia, has no accountability to Russian citizens whatsoever. The entire power structure of a vast country is based on fear. Nothing more. It's been that way for centuries. That alone makes it impossible to negotiate in good faith, because what is dangerous to the Russian oligarchy about democracy is the existence of democracy, anywhere. The existence of democracy, the very whisper of it, as they learned from the Cold War, is ipso facto a threat to their absolute control over their own population. It will always represent a threat. This is why it's so shameful for America to turn its back on Ukraine, and why no one is surprised that Iran and China and North Korea are friendly with Russia. Their shared interest is in preventing their own masses of people from being allowed to squeak a single word of protest. And they are hollow, weak regimes because of it; they are terrified of the openness of Western societies.

The current modality of "free speech" being the rallying cry for the pro-Russian contingent in the West is all the more absurd on its face for that reason.

It would take a complete fool of a national leader to place any trust in either the US or Russia. Both have clearly and repeatedly demonstrated that deals and agreements and treaties mean absolutely nothing beyond 4-8 years.

Russia is only incentivized to accelerate their cyber operations against the US. It's clear their manipulation of the narrative to their benefit is working in winning over the right wing of America and sowing discontent in some Americans against Ukraine. Why would they stop when they're succeeding?

> One assumes there is at least some mutuality here, and that Russia has also indicated it's standing down offensive ops? Some basic bilaterality? Christmas truce in the trenches?

(Insert "Hahaha...No." gif here)

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43210138

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