Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

The headline belies the utter ridiculousness of the idea. Why would the United States and United Kingdom be singled out to have backdoor access to all communications? To hang onto the tattered remnants of their empires while keeping their own people in line despite their declining political legitimacy.

View on HN

If one looks around they will see most political regimes are very interested in keeping their "constituents" in line and maintaining their political legitimacy. As such it isn't a phenomenon specific to the west, it simply appears to be discussed here as we have slightly more open media than in other countries who would dearly love to have the same access to encrypted data.

I actually wouldn't be surprised at all if the US and UK governments would be perfectly fine with China, Russia and so on being able to hack and spy most of their citizens and companies as long as they could also do that.

From their point of view it might be quite a good trade-off, because they probably think it's far more useful for them to spy and hack US and UK citizens than it is for China and Russia.

And they also probably think that they, the elites, could use something better than what everyone else uses, too. So there's no negative to this.

The united States isn't an empire, that's what it was formed to get away from. It's a collection of people, living in different communities called states that strive to stay united to form a more perfect union. It isn't a perfect experiment because people are not perfect but it's the best effort history has seen so far.

Tell that to the countries the US keeps invading. At the very least Grenada, Iraq (2003), and Panama. But the list is far longer and more complicated (and stretches back fifty years or more).

Nobody would call the US an "empire" if all it did was keep in its own territory and stay out of other country's internal affairs. Nobody calls Canada an empire for example. But the US keeps deciding to outright attack other countries or uses the CIA to subvert internal politics (and sometimes to overthrow democratically elected governments e.g. Iran).

The US deserves to be accused of having imperial intent, even if just based on their interest in other country's oil.

> The US deserves to be accused of having empirical intent, even if just based on their interest in other country's oil.

The word you're looking for is "imperial." "Empirical" means something else entirely.

Canada itself isn't an empire, it's just part of one.

Heck, tell that to France, who can't manage to root out the US influence in their telcos or their intelligence services, and who are powerless offer asylum to Assange and/or Snowden.

I suggest you read Robert Kagan's "Dangerous Nation". It skewers the idea that America is not an empire, and demonstrates that America has always been aggressively expansionist.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dangerous-Nation-Americas-Earliest-T...

The US clearly hasn't always been aggressively expansionist. It isn't today.

America has had the most powerful military on earth for 70 years, along with a large population. List all of the vast amounts of territory it has annexed using that extraordinary military power. There are endless opportunities to do so, and the US is the sole military with global projection.

Some people point to military bases. Which doesn't work in any regard. A few critical differences being: taxing power on the local population, or vast plunder. Neither of which America is known for. And US military bases around the globe overwhelmingly exist by permission.

You don't necessarily have to annex territory to control it, either politically or economically.

But why bother to control territory unless one gets some benefit from it? Throughout history, nations have sought more territory because most wealth came from land and its use. Annexing territory was the fastest way to grow the tax base.

Controlling territory but not extracting wealth is pointless. The U.S. doesn't extract wealth from its foreign bases; in fact it injects wealth because the bases are paid for by U.S. dollars but the downstream spending goes into the local economy.

And you might think "well the U.S. extracts the wealth through trade." But trade is mutually beneficial (unlike taxes) and the U.S. runs a foreign trade deficit anyway.

The things that the U.S. gets for its projected power are peace and stability. These are things that benefit any nation, though.

Are you sure about that? http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/wadd...

http://www.theweeklings.com/wp-content/uploads/US-Military-B...

That's right, the US was born with those states. They weren't aggressively annexed as a simple matter of controlling foreign territory or anything.

Maybe you think that China is ascendant, but the fact remains that the West is closely aligned and utterly dominant.

It is not a simple east/west matter. States themselves are in a period of declining influence after a historically abnormal 400 years of strong states and a state-based order. Their power to influence culture, drive people's decisions, set prices and drive morals is being eaten by multinational corporations, religious institutions, NGO's, online communities like Reddit and HN, name it. State influence is shrinking, and their best answer is to compensate with power.

Globalization has weakened The State, in general, though not all states equally.

Yes, the West is still dominant but geopolitical and economic power is shifting South and East and Western influence and power is waning. China and the U.S. both know that at the moment each nation is dependent on the other and the collapse of one would have serious repercussions for the global economy.

Hence we get scenarios where China is claiming islands a thousand miles off its coast as domestic territory and while the US Air Force flies overhead and Obama tut-tuts the whole thing is a boundary pushing exercise (no pun intended) and China continues to do what it wants, within reason. China knows that shooting civilians as in Tiananmen Square in 1989 makes for very unflattering optics and jeopardizes the Western trade and investment it needs.

Every day articles and blog posts announces the imminent demise of US and Western power or China's impending economic collapse. It's possible of course but for the moment not very probable. But it is clear that the West is no longer *utterly dominant.

> But it is clear that the West is no longer *utterly dominant

Economically, militarily and culturally they are, what metric are you using?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com