Re:Google’s top security teams unilaterally shut down a coun...
by tgragnato on Friday March 26, 2021 @12:48PM
(#26594227)
> The fact that Western countries aren't spending billions to comprehensively subvert the Great Firewall is a significant strategic failure.
I have strong opinions in this matter.
The GFW is only possible because of metadata leaks that Western countries are exploiting too, for security and surveillance, or whatever.
Suppose Western countries start investing billions in subverting the Golden Shield, our own infrastructure and economy would suffer too.
A very naive but simple example:
I tried to train https://github.com/Kkevsterrr/geneva against a CheckPoint and a Fortinet ... It's not been fun for those "next gen firewalls", and CheckPoint is a NASDAQ-100, Fortinet an S&P 500.
At the same time, I feel like there's still something there. Having nuclear weapons makes existing states much more resistant to opposition. Other states can't topple them in the traditional way because of MAD.
But neither can local freedom fighters -- suppose pro-democracy forces took three major cities in China and started using them as an industrial base to wage a conventional war against the regime. The US and anyone else couldn't really help them the way France did the nascent American Revolution, because of MAD. And if they actually started winning regardless, couldn't the dying regime nuke the rebel cities?
If we don't want people to live under permanent authoritarianism, maybe we still need something to level the playing field.
Though it doesn't necessarily have to be nukes; establishing uncensorable distributed communications comes to mind as an anti-authoritarian power. The fact that Western countries aren't spending billions to comprehensively subvert the Great Firewall is a significant strategic failure.