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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

Do we have proven (or probable) case of USA industrial espionage ?

Well, yes, since long before the current administration. It's mentioned multiple times (with examples) in the European Parliament's "The Echelon Affair" report.[0] But it seems to me that this is not really what you're asking, but rather you're implying that there's no justification for this move other than European protectionism. If this is the case, I would argue that a sitting administration actively threatening with the invasion of your territories is a compelling argument for politicians and business leaders to evaluate alternatives.

[0] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...

You don’t need an espionage case to decide a provider is too much risk.

The political unreliability alone is enough. Just takes one orange guy waking up in a foul mood one day and doing something erratic. That increases risk for using anything American across the board even if the individual companies have done nothing wrong

Case in point: the Claude Fable debacle. It's not a big stretch to imagine that one day, they might decide any AI platform developed by an American company is too dangerous to let those shady foreigners access it. Not to mention the potential implications of your internal code being sent to AI datacenters in the US...

We have a proven case of USA pulling the plug. Not sure which is worse.

Do we? From a EU-hosted location? Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.

> I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.

Even more mundane reason would be the USA threatening war.

Before you come and say something like Trump threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada is just bluster/ these are democracies that answer to their people, and their people are mad about that, which is going to direct policy. The sentiment in those countries about the US is on par with those on Russia and China, if you think that is not to the US detriment I’m not sure what to say.

> Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.

Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel

If we continue using US hyperscalers then we deserve to have our industries turned off when Trump decides to grab Greenland. Being stupid should get punished.

Recently the US gov't had Microsoft shut down an ICC judge's work email account. The threat is very real of more serious shenanigans (though I personally think the risk of backdoors introduced to any other software they use is just as real - Europe is just too much of a patchwork of jurisdictions to get this right).

From the NY Times, 1995:

> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes

At the time "only" to have the upper hand in trade negotiations, and presumably when "having the President press foreign countries to award business to American firms", as they call it. But that was 30 years ago, and trust that these these things aren't directly forwarded to US private industry is in short supply these days

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/15/world/emerging-role-for-t...

https://archive.is/LmEA1 (same site without paywall)

If any company, especially one with a global presence, ever even strongly suspected that had happened and a competitor was using something they developed you'd of seen it play out in the courtroom. Hopefully we can all agree that if America is good at anything, it's letting its lawyers be litigious.

The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95326824311657269 (https://archive.is/N46di)

Why We Spy on Our Allies

March 17, 2000 11:56 am ET

By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.

We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?

tl;dr: "You bribe, so we spy"

I haven't read the op-ed, but I wonder if it talks about the French Leclerc case?

TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>

I think this was about two separate events in 1994:

Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see "Company Spies," May/June 1994).

https://irp.fas.org/program/process/991101-echelon-mj.htm

Yes, but the US bribes too. In fact, I'd say that corruption is more common in the US than in much of Europe. The article's claim that the US worships Adam Smith is only nominally true; in practice, they love nothing more than monopolisation and market domination.

> Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?

Any advantage that they can exploit. It's no great secret that the US government often acts on behalf of its major corporations and vice versa.

It doesn’t have to be espionage, it can be just operational risk. There is the case of Trump ordering sanctions against the International Criminal Court, and Microsoft blocking their accounts to comply (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203). Or more recently, Trump deciding who gets access to Anthropic’s latest models. You can’t build a business on a vendor who may be forced to block you at any moment.

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