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Comment by rakel_rakel | Hacker News Reader

> On the global stage, state-sponsored attacks from actors like China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have threatened to compromise the infrastructure that underpins both civilian life and military readiness.

AITA for thinking that PRISM was probably the state sponsored program affecting civilian life the most? And that one state is missing from the list here?

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> Large American AI company does not list the US as an adversarial actor

This is not a surprise or a gotcha.

Said company is literally in court against said government at the moment, after said government attempted to designate it too dangerous to do business with.

There are currently over 1,000 companies involved in lawsuits against the US government right now even if we restrict ourselves to just tariff lawsuits.

And the government is attempting "corporate murder" on precisely one of them. Wanna guess which one?

AFAIK Apple also "denied FBI to decrypt iPhone" while participating in PRISM

I can think of two I’d add to the list. One was recently publicly denied access to Anthropics models and the other was busy exploding pagers.

Not clear how an LLM is going to prevent a bomb from being put in a custom-built pager, or why Anthropic should object to Israel waging war against a militia whose goal it is to destroy that country.

Because they use LLMs to “intelligence-wash” targeting civilians, and murdered children by blowing up pagers in public areas (what you called “waging war against a militia”).

Operating an armed group out of civilian areas is not “one weird trick” that makes you immune from attacks. It means you are endangering the civilians around you by putting them in harms way.

No war has ever been waged without civilian casualties, Israel is the only country held to this standard. “Thousands” of Hezbollah pagers were exploded and there were apparently 2 children killed. This is a tragedy as is every civilian death, but that’s pretty amazingly targeted and an extremely low civilian death toll for thousands of bombs.

For contrast, Hezbollah fired one single rocket and killed 12 children: https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-dark-day-for-majdal-shams-dr...

> PRISM was probably the state sponsored program affecting civilian life the most?

No state-sponsored hacking affected Americans materially. I just don't think we were networked enough in the 2010s. The risk is higher now since we're in a more warmongering world. (Kompromat on a power-plant technician is a risk in peace. It means blackouts in war.)

The fact that Iran hasn't been able to do diddly squat in America should sink in the fact that they didn't compromise us. (EDIT: blep. I was wrong.)

Iranian-Affiliated Cyber Actors Exploit Programmable Logic Controllers Across US Critical Infrastructure - https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa... - April 7th, 2026

Did they activate them to any noticeable effect?

To my knowledge, not yet. The attack surface in question is extensive, and in my opinion, targets are likely unprepared for a determined and sophisticated attacker.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/07/iranian-hackers-ene...

It's 2026, and these PLCs etc. are directly connected to the internet? I think that's the most surprising aspect here.

It doesn’t surprise me at all. Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome. Security is simply not valued, in many cases.

>No state-sponsored hacking affected Americans materially.

Uh, what?

NotPetya was kind of a big deal.

Not in the US. I had to look it up and I work in infrastructure software

The irony of that statement given the current circumstances

How did PRISM affect civilian life?

Honest question: how do state-sponsored attacks from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia affect civilian life?

Presumably, those have influenced elections, though I guess it depends what you count as an attack.

Plenty of bots try to modify public opinion. Someone hacked the DNC in 2015/16, the result of which also alleged attempted manipulation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee_...

Since we (as old Rummy said) do not know what we do not know, we cannot be certain about the extent of cyber attacks and what they might have influenced, and may not know these things until discoveries decades later, if ever.

Yes... they might have influenced elections and now, as a result, the world must cope with the Trump regime.

Let's now fool ourselves.... Trump is probably the best, most successful attempt at world de-stabilisation all those rogue states ever achieved.

Maybe Americans should take responsibility for electing a maniac as their President. In the end, the buck stops with Americans.

~1/3rd of US citizens voted for him. Don’t lump us all in.

Some of you are just guilty of negligence yes.

Or maybe it's that our archaic system was designed so that some people's votes literally matter more than others, and more than half the country does not have a meaningful voice in our Federal elections.

This is negligence with extra steps.

> more than half the country does not have a meaningful voice in our Federal elections

There is almost certainly an election on your ballot every time that is meaningful. Relinquishing that civic duty is how we get Trump. People to lazy, stupid or proud to vote absolutely bear responsibility for this mess.

I agree to an extent but I have a hard time blaming many in the LGBT community/supporters of Palestine for sitting out when Harris and co so thoroughly abandoned them in the general. They stood behind Biden in 2020 then watched as the democrats gave in on trans rights and did nothing to stop Israel’s campaign. Now they’re watching Newsome and folks gleefully accept trans erasure going into the mid terms/next election, so they’ve been validated in many ways.

Is it tactically sound? No. Is it what I did? No. But I’ve had enough conversations with folks that I get where they’re coming from, even if I thought it was the wrong decision.

The number of people who can vote, but don't, is staggering.

I vote in local, state, and federal elections. I have volunteered with multiple campaigns and causes, and given substantial time/labor to the EFF. I have been harassed by Trump supporters while filming protests and other civic action. Please do not presume to know me.

I get you’re angry but you’re swinging at the wrong person.

It wasn’t personal.

You weren’t the commenter and either way it’s an unproductive blame game that doesn’t fix anything or help anyone.

Good. But the parent was blaming Trump on disinformation propaganda, and it is important to point out that the remaining 1/3-rd of the country is not some kind of idiot army that replaced their brains with FB propaganda. They voted for this actively.

Also, in a democracy you don't get to disavow 1/3rd of the population that didn't vote with you.

Clearly you do, since Donald Trump has been aggressively doing this for his whole political career. I agree that it's a morally problematic thing to do, and it can be bad tactically depending on the situation. Practically, it does happen without consequences.

2/3rd’s* that didn’t vote with you.

Not if the election was stolen. There was a smattering of evidence after the election but the speed with which is disappeared was truly something to behold.

Note the RNC was also hacked but the data was not leaked. Presumably used to influence the election and policies in other ways.

I believe the popular sentiment is that when they hacked the DNC they found a handful of things that would provide bad optics for the party. But the RNC? They found so much evidence of criminality that near to the entire party flipped positions on issues related to Russia. So we have 2x successful hacks, one of which yielded some bad press for the Dems, and yielded an entirely compromised party in the Repubs who now are being actively blackmailed.

All of that applies equally to PRISM and any internal propaganda campaigns that was feeding into, no?

WannaCry massively affected the NHS.

century energy ransomware no?

Look, we have always been at war with EastAsia.

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