Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, the US has its delicate sensibilities hurt by cyber espionage! Come on China, why would you spy on us? It's so mean and unfair, why would anyone do it?

Despicable.

Why not host Defcon in Canada, or somewhere else? If Chinese hackers cannot attend industry events because of the US's imperialistic tendencies, it's our responsibility to modify our events so that they can.

View on HN

Perhaps our discomfort with the Chinese[1] has more to do with defending our secrets (business, political, military, infrastructure etc) than our delicate sensibilities, though I hear where you're coming from.

Still, wouldn't you say it's in the US's interests (and Canada's, for that matter) to try to marginally disrupt the flow of tips of the hacking trade to the Chinese, in spite of the despicable aftertaste?

[1] http://www.projecthoneypot.org/statistics.php

Oh it's undoubtedly in the US's interests to do so. So is our proliferation and maintenance of military presence throughout the globe.

Obvious moral issues with both though. ;)

PyCon "US" was in Canada this year, and will be next year too... Why not move DefCon to Canada too?

Canada's CSEC is as closely partnered with the NSA as GCHQ is. They even hacked Brazilian private oil companies, most likely for economic reasons similar to China:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/08/brazil-accuses-...

I don't see why Canada is a better choice either. This is all political theater.

Tendency to spy and tendency to exclude visitors for specious reasons are orthogonal. US immigration control is notorious, even amongst citizens just trying to reenter our own country from other "friendly" countries.

Americans involved in defcon possibly do not want to cross borders. I pity the border agent who powers the wrong defcon-bound machine in order to extract information. Lets hope they have excellent airgapping and sandboxing etc.

I guess the Euro conferences would welcome Chinese hackers.

The allegations are that China used state-sponsored espionage to gather industrial secrets to give to Chinese industry. Apparently, it's ok to spy as long as you keep the information within the government alone. Disrupting capitalism is the crime, not espionage. </s>

It is okay to spy if you are the ones doing the spying. This has always been the case - shock that some foreign power is spying, expelling those spies from our nation, waiting for our ahem diplomatic staff to be expelled from their nation.

I for one would love to attend Defcon in Canada.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com