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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

Great if you live outside the US, but if you're inside the US, would not the very act of connecting to a foreign secure service automatically make you suspect?

There is a much deeper issue here: as Americans, we need to decide how much protection we actually want. One group says everyone is responsible for their own protection, another says everyone needs protecting from everyone else, yet another group says we'll protect you if you don't look to closely behind the curtain, and so on e pluribus ad-infinitum ...

Nobody has a good solution, yet. Personally, I don't mind the NSA spying on foreigners (that's their job) and if you're not from the US, I feel like you should have known that was a possibility.

What I'd settle for at the moment is more independent oversight by people not intimately connected to the defense industry and less secret courts and judgements that make us look and sound like cartoon banana republic.

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Do you mind if the UK, Russian, or Chinese security agencies spy on you? After all that's their job? And by spy I do mean trojan your personal machine and keep you in a database?

Consider me the devils advocate, but wouldn't foreign spy-ing be better than local spying if they can't make use of that data to incriminate you in your daily life?

Better in that sense I agree but not 'good'.

I think that's just inevitable. Do I mind? Yes. Can I personally do anything about it? Probably not a whole hell of a lot.

There are no guarantees that my information is safe from prying eyes. However, I think I'd be much happier if I felt like I could at least trust the people who purport to be on my side. Right now, I do not trust them.

While I wouldn't consider the comment down-vote worth as someone else deemed it, I find one part I have to respond to.

"if you're not from the US, I feel like you should have known that was a possibility."

Known exactly what was a possibility? In another comment I brought up Endgame Systems, here is some of their offerings:

'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.'

When you say 'foreigners' should have known the NSA "doing their thing" so to speak is a possibility, does that include them being exploited, or their stolen financial/personal information on botnets being used by the NSA?

I think the idea that you can trust any country that is not your own to be up to no good on the internet should be the default state of mind, even the countries that are, in other aspects, considered allies. This should be the mindset for every country and this should be communicated to their users frequently and explicitly: "If you store your data outside our borders, you probably will get screwed in some way."

NOTE: Where I said "foreigners" I probably should have written "foreign countries". The term "foreigners" reads a bit offensively on review.

As for the "stolen financial/personal information" bit, that's part of the information gathering (and technically, it's not stolen - see the whole argument on copyright). As long as the data is being used for analysis, that's a fair use for a government organization dedicated to spying. If it's being used for financial gain, that's a very grey area dependent on current laws, and if it's being turned over to or collected by private entities operating without oversight, that's just out-of-bounds.

Ultimately, the point was that one should be able to trust one's own government to be operating in one's own best interest, but never assume that another government or it's framework of laws will ever be of any help to you. If it is, then you got lucky.

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