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Comment by oafitupa | Hacker News Reader

Engineers have to work with what they have.

Do you disagree that he made the right decision?

Is there solid evidence that these countries are engaging in the same stuff as the NSA?

Yes, I disagree. If there's an almost guaranteed chance that my org will be spied on, I would rather have the US do the spying. Unlike a BRICS country, at least the US has the occasional Snowden to shed light on things. The resulting scandal may do little to change the status quo, but it'll lead to a discussion and maybe a civil suit my company can win.

I have never heard of a similar public leaker from Russia or China (I imagine those people just quickly get disappeared).

As for BRICS country spying, we have some very solid evidence that China is engaging in cyber espionage of both US military and corporate targets.

If you are working on US based consumer web site, spying by NSA could be much more harmful than spying by China or Russia for vast majority of users. NSA is known to provide leads to police that then reconstructed evidence to exclude any links to NSA and still arrest/harass the person. There are people who are not national security risk in US jails because of NSA (mostly drug busts). BRICS countries have zero interest whether you smoke dope in your free time and won't rat you out to local police.

PS. I am not arguing that they should not be in jail. Just that NSA used semi-legal (waterboarding!=torture kind) methods to obtain initial leads.

What if dissidents are using your service because it's outside their country of origin and they get disappeared because of it?

As I said it's better to be located outside of country where majority of your users are. If your service targets american market, you can minimize risk to majority of your users by locating service outside of US. Dissident disappearing is mostly red herring - people disappear in US too (Guantanomo).

Lack of evidence is not proof they aren't doing it. You can still say there is risk of it and ponder how much risk that means. There's definitely some concern of Chinese hardware.

Can you answer the question?

There was plenty of solid evidence of those countries spying on US citizens long before there was solid evidence of the US spying on US citizens.

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