Isn’t it common knowledge that the US and China is spying on everyone? The main difference is that China is not a military ally, and its government spying, which is unfettered, supports its private enterprise that is government financed and owned. US govt spying is unfettered. US corporate spying far more restricted because US businesses are bound by Federal and State laws, and it’s not centrally coordinated, instead US businesses are autonomous entities. And though US corporate spying on customers is rampant, it is also transparently written into usage contracts. US corporate spying is obviously for profit, and since the US and Europe are strategically tied through NATO, it’s not on the same threat level. China and its axis ally Russia, clearly bump up against the West because our political systems are fundamentally opposite, democratic vs autocratic.
What this translates to is Chinese investors are agressively running around buying into key strategic businesses, advised by data gathering in coordination with its government, with a view to maintaining control, which reflects how the country is managed itself.
American investors are running around buying/competing against business in coordination with data rich parent company entities, with a view to making money. But because it’s a democratic country where laws preserve autonomy even against the government, it’s a free for all and anyone can play, even Chinese owned American companies. Which is a reflection of how the US is managed itself.
This is also how Europe is managed, so I do believe Chinese control of telcos is a bigger threat to Europe’s way of life.
This is a speck of misapprehension that slipped in to your otherwise great writeup. Governments don't naturally conflict because they have different forms and they don't make automatic friends when they are similar. The US is presently allied with many autocracies. Middle-aged Europe was uniformly feudal, and constantly at war. Pre-WWII America was strictly isolationist and despite being a democracy had a fairly sized pro-Hitler element. Governments conflict when they have something to conflict over.
US leadership fundamentally doesn't care about human rights abuses in China more than Chinese leadership cares about abuses against black people in the US. They don't care about bringing democracy in a country when their next move is to make sure "the right" leader is appointed. They don't care about freedom of speech when they can block it as needed under any pretense. And they don't care about any of the principles they advocate if those principles get in their way, they will all happily ally with someone embodying the exact thing they're fighting against if it server their interest of maintaining or growing their power.
And getting to the point addressed above, they care about the image of the company they forced to introduce backdoors only as far as they can be punished by the bigger power, or if they can't sell it as fighting the terrorists (or scare word of the day). Case in point, Sweden and Ericsson wouldn't get away with it because their sphere of influence is a stone's throw away and the US would crucify them. China and Russia can mostly get away with it because their influence extends far enough that they have enough of a "friendly audience" for which they can sell a story. The US can get away with it everywhere else because even if Cisco is backdoored through and through, the US is the dominant superpower and is able to pressure allies to "see things" their way, and they can also sell everything as "the fight against ...".
Superpowers see advancing their interests by any means as a matter of survival and this takes precedence over anything else. They'll do what needs to be done and deal with the fallout after. And if you live long enough to move through these different regimes you start seeing the pattern immediately, only thing that changes is the "feel good" story the people are served with.
Most democracies are in general against war for practical reasons, wars are a drain away from stuff at home that's important for them as people. US citizens may be "less likely" to want that but only because recent history has saturated them with the justification that the war is against regimes with "different values". It's an easy sell for people who are never to keen on going beyond that. So it would mostly be a matter of repackaging the justification. Some democracies can afford both the wars and the "moral repackaging" for their citizens.
But people also misunderstand democracy and what it means. The fact that the interests of the majority are respected might also mean that the minority is suffering a great deal. How well are black people's interests represented in the US?
One the other hand in democracy you are allowed to give a tiny endorsement to a person or party for a leadership position in the hope that they will represent your interest while others are buying "priority" over you for this representation with far more than a vote. You're not seeing this as less of a democracy so people are not judging political systems based on their actual implementation but rather by picking and choosing on particular values.
Russia is ostensibly a democracy, albeit one where the leadership is somewhat predetermined a very small minority. USA is a democracy albeit one where the leadership is somewhat representing the interests of a very small minority. I'm sure a war between these two is not seen as such a remote possibility in terms of people's preference.
Reasonably well it would seem from the outside. 11% of congress is "black", which is roughly in line with population and there seem to be hundreds of laws and programs aimed at helping them. And there's also lots of media attention to their problems and struggles.
That picture turns to the opposite when looking at statistics of jail and prison inmates representation, or when looking at how the wealth in the country is racially divided and whole neighborhoods still racially and economically segregated.
In that context BLM is not really a new thing, it's just the most modern manifestation of a rather old and still very on-going issue [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_riots#United_St...
A group can have plenty of political representation and institutional and legal support and still struggle for other reasons (e.g. historic oppression or cultural problems depending on whether you lean left or right).
Though on second thought there still are a few laws with racist intent on the books aren't there? Though they're being undone at a decent clip.
People treated well don't need lots of media attention to remind those treating them well that black lives matter, in 2021. I'd say that for a democracy that's a pretty bad track record that isn't improving fast enough. Democratic majority decisions sometimes leave the minority far behind.
The US electoral system may have it’s flaws, but to compare it to Russia is absurd.
How many opposition leaders has the US government tried to murder recently?
The statement was clearly about the relationship each country has with democracy, comparing not to each other but to what democracy should be. There's value in evaluating things against what they should be, not against an arbitrarily worse thing. It's the only way to see the flaws and look to improve.
It's difficult to disentangle that from the unpopularity of war. Since democratic regimes are harder to get to do things, because you have to convince more than one person, the null hypothesis would be that autocratic regimes have a higher propensity for belligerence, especially in societies predating the invention of propaganda.
But in a totalitarian regime, consent of the governed did not matter much. Expressions of pacifism would land you in a concentration camp really quick.
Democracies care a little more about what the average Joe thinks, even though they are far from perfect in this regard and consent can be sorta-kinda manufactured.
The reality is that countries you call "democracies" are allies of the United States, while countries you call "dictatorships" are enemies. If a democracy is to be an enemy, the first course of action is to first make it stop being a democracy. Then if it goes your way there's nothing to be worried about, and if the chaos installs someone you don't like then you're not fighting a democracy.
The Chinese government has popular support. So were many others the US invaded or overthrew - some were even democracies. It doesn't matter, as we saw with the Iraq war any inconvenient facts will not make it into the narratives and any lies will be disseminated as needed.
Because if you criticise the Chinese government you disappear for a few months at best. If you’re unlucky you’re never seen again.
> countries you call "democracies" are allies of the United States, while countries you call "dictatorships"
That’s an extraordinarily bold claim and I think you should have to back it up with some evidence. Which of the countries that are called dictatorships do you think are unjustly labeled as such?
Wasn't too long ago that being considered too far on the left in the US was a professional and social death sentence.
Was neither too long ago that anybody who opposed illegal wars of aggression, torture, and state-sponsored assassinations, was deemed a "treacherous terrorist supporter" who might as well have flown the planes into the towers themselves, the earlier versions of that involved sending armed soldiers to violently break up peaceful student protesters ala Kent State.
Heck, "race riots" are a regular thing in the US to this day, yet somehow not considered political, nor the countless black activists that were jailed, left to live in exile, or straight up assassinated in the US [0], somehow none of that is considered "political" [1].
Add in the reality how the US has not just the biggest prison population, but also the highest incarceration rate on the planet, and it comes across as a bit tone-deaf to constantly evoke how in the "evil not US countries" people are allegedly getting vanished in droves, but never ever in the US [2].
[0] https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/more-than-80-percent-of-the-...
Laughable considering cordial relationship between US and Vietnam. The latter political system is basically a clone of China.
The main difference is that US law is exported to the rest of the world's population and Chinese law is not.
If Julian Assange leaked Chinese intelligence/war-crime-evidence he would be at home raising his kids right now.
“There is a root backdoor in the telnetd of Ericssons AXE backdoor”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/another_story...
The article in Dutch on Philips Telecommuncations (which became Lucent later on):
https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/nederland-luist...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/story_of_the_...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/phone_tapping...
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/death-athens-rogue-nsa-o...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/30/athens...
and all time favorite:
The "Back doors" in AXE are a slightly different thing. Many countries have laws that says that law enforcement have the right to wiretap phone calls under some circumstances. This means that telcos want and ask for this feature so that they can comply with the law. The telcos are aware of the systems capability because they need it to be there. Anyone who reads the law can see that the telcos has to facilitate wiretapping, but they obviously dont want to advertise it, so its an open secret.
Its quite different if you deliver a solution, with a hidden back door that the customer dont know about or have asked for, for the benefit of the intelligence service in the country of manufacturing. Enabling a nation to wiretap illegally in countries where they do not have jurisdiction.
How does Linus ability to go public make it more dangerous for intelligence services?
That implies intelligence services approaching him with such an offer would put themselves in danger of consequences just for asking, when that's evidently not true: There were no consequences for the NSA for asking Linus, there were no consequences for the NSA in the vast majority of cases it was caught doing something it shouldn't do.
It's also not true that in the "free society" is some binary thing: In the US National Security Letters are a very real thing, outfits affected by them are legally not allowed to publicize it. By any definition of this "free society keeps intelligence services in check" logic that should not be a thing, but it is, just like many other legal tools to suppress the free and open reporting about "national security" issues.
- no need for backdoors since Huawei, Ericsson & Nokia are full to the brim with bugdoors (Huawei tops the chart here since many years already and as anyone involved in Inter-Operability-Testing (IOT) at the NEV will confirm).
- no need for "compromising networks" when you have the actual vendor (Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson often their subcontractors) sitting totally legally in your ISP's network and being paid for responding to the alarms raised and escalated by O&M.
- even the attacks against 3/4/5G become academic in the discussion of nation state threat actors when they can operate and exploit simply as an insider of the system. These weaknesses (as outrageous as they are) are useful but it's a different threat model
If I was I was a intelligence agency in a country where there is a risk of blow-back, like in Europe or the US, I might prefer to use exploits. That way you haven't compromised your own country infrastructure (as much) and the risk of leaks is much lower since you dont have to work with an outside entity. A government agency forcing a domestic company to add backdoors, looks much worse if it gets out, then an agency using existing bugs.
If I'm a Intelligence agency in a country that doesn't care about blow-back like China or Russia, why bother finding and using an exploit, when you can call up the vendor and have them design the system with your use-case in mind? You dont have to worry about someone fixing the bug you have spent man years making exploitable, and you can make sure the backdoor can only be used by you. Its way more convenient and cost effective.
China is now suffering fron Huawei blowback in quite a few western countries.
I think Huawei, would have experienced almost the same blowback even if they didn't have any backdoor. Western intelligence experts, would have advised against using Huawei without any evidence of backdoors, simply because they know they would have put in backdoors if they where in the position of china, and they assume the Chinese aren't incompetent.
The blow back also serves a political purposes for everyone around. Western politicians/military gets to say "We need to protect ourselves against scary China!". And China's propaganda machine gets to say "Look at the terrible racist west treating us unfairly, by accusing us of bad things without evidence!".
And for US, google Cloud Act.
[0] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/cryptoleaks/2020/...
[1] https://www.ceesjansen.nl/en/cryptography/
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2020.1...
Any country that is serious about cyber security needs to develop and maintain its own communication network.
If this became known the subjects of interest would stop using those networks. Only the low level criminals would be dumb enough to get caught.
Which is why the intelligence services never do the hacking themselves. Instead, they buy the data off the "dark web", from the hackers whole stole and the information brokers who trade in it. If they have to do that, that is. In the US at least, agencies can just buy data on the open market. Supposedly "anonymized", but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this knows that protection is flimsy.
- Buy exploits on the market, with the US govt being the biggest buyer.
- Buy data off legitimate advertising and intelligence companies
- Hire people to find bugdoors
- Hire people to infiltrate all sorts of companies and extract information or plant bugdoors
- Convince or coerce companies to plant bugdoors in their own products
- Do the hacking themselves, plant hardware backdoors and so on
Unsurprisingly, they use all available methods.
That's so wrong it hurts! All our press are dependent on government "presstöd" aka handouts.
https://rsf.org/en/our-supporters
They have the CIA vehicle for regime change as one of their sponsors, the amusingly named National Endowment for Democracy that specializes in overthrowing non-white democracies and regime change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democra...
https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-th...
They also don't mind white regime change, NED, along with NATO, the US DoS, and a couple of other rather relevant names, where openly sponsoring [0] "Yat's our man" [1], who ended up becoming PM of Ukraine after Euromaidan escalated into a full blown coup.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukrai...
If the country is a democratic one to begin with, the grants do more good by insulating the press from commercial powers than they do bad in this way, in my opinion.
The complaint was that a grant from the government makes the press less free to criticise the government.
If the grant is clearly and legally bound to be determined according to a set of objective and publicly available metrics I do not see that it would be such a big problem.
Of course a vindictive government could do what they can to negatively affect the press outlet in question but similarly could a supporting public affect them.
In any case it can all be accounted and prepared for as long as the process is objective and transparent.
Bart Gellman's book says that Snowden warned him not to be the only person in possession of the leaked data prior to publication, as the US intelligence community would kill him (Gellman) instantly to prevent the publication of the information contained therein.
This was the biggest takeaway from the book, for me: the US military will assassinate US citizens (journalists!) in the middle of New York City without due process or a trial to prevent them from carrying out journalism.
We expect this kind of cloak and dagger shit from the CIA, but it pays to think about it in clear terms: the US military can and will assassinate US citizens engaging in constitutionally protected activity in the middle of Manhattan with no consequences whatsoever.
Not that he’s necessarily wrong, but it seems like a leap to go from Snowden saying something he believes, to a certainty that “the US military can and will assassinate US citizens in the middle of manhattan”.
After CIA training, he worked in Geneva under diplomatic cover, in 2007 to 2009.
It is much more realistic that what happened was a true "Burn after reading moment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pabA320p9B0
He wrote about some of the things that happened in Geneva, I encourage you to read them. Even sysadmins for the CIA need to know some stuff about how the game works.
This feels like a strawman to cling to the idea that being a US citizen means that the CIA won't assassinate you for being inconvenient, which has been literally and directly claimed, at least twice, by someone from the actual CIA.
Indeed, the reason you even know the name Jason Bourne, or the reason those movies work, is because of the generation-long history and reputation of the US military intelligence services to break the law flagrantly in many countries with no meaningful consequences. We don't have to suspend disbelief to engage with the idea that there is a section of government with staff who can kill anyone they deem needs killing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
The potential murder of Gellman was stated by Snowden, who was trained by the CIA, and was stated on more than one occasion.
A US State Department document made available by the National Security Archive on 10 April 2010 reveals that a démarche protesting Pinochet's Operation Condor assassination program was proposed and sent on 23 August 1976 to US diplomatic missions in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile to be delivered to their host governments but later rescinded on 16 September 1976 by Henry Kissinger, following concerns raised by US ambassadors assigned there of both personal safety and a likely diplomatic contretemps. Five days later, the Letelier assassination took place.[8]
Documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated 28 April 1978, which showed that the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders.[9] The report stated, "Contreras told a confidante he authorized the assassination of Letelier on orders from Pinochet."[9] A State Department document also referred to eight separate CIA reports from around the same date, each sourced to "extremely sensitive informants" who provided evidence of Pinochet's direct involvement in ordering the assassination and in directing the subsequent cover-up.[9]
During the tenure of Richard Downie at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a U.S. Southern Command educational institution located at the National Defense University, the alleged (and as yet unproven) role of Jaime Garcia Covarrubias, a Chilean professor who was head of counterintelligence for DINA in the 1970s, in the torture and murder of seven detainees was revealed inside the center. His alleged role was first brought to Downie's attention in early 2008 by Center Assistant Professor Martin Edwin Andersen, a senior staff member who earlier, as a senior advisor for policy planning at the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, was the first national security whistleblower to receive the U.S. Office of Special Counsel's "Public Servant Award."[10] In an October 1987 investigative report in The Nation, Andersen broke the story of how, in a June 1976 meeting in the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Kissinger gave the bloody military junta in neighboring Argentina the "green light" for their own dirty "war."[11]
It really diminishes your point when that is compared to an airstrike on foreign soil.
We don't say that the FSB attempting to execute Skripal in a UK shopping mall doesn't count because it was in the UK. Murder is murder.
The claim that the IC would assassinate Gellman in New York was made by someone who used to be an actual CIA operative and went through their training.
Does that mean that all systems are compromised? No, because there are risks associated with tapping in to these systems. Partly it depends on if they have access to the systems, but mostly on the possible blow-back if they get caught.
Example: Swedens FRA (NSA equivalent) could in theory ask Ericsson (a Swedish company), to install a backdoor. But, Sweden has a fairly free press, and there are good chances that someone would leak this information. If it got leaked it would be a major scandal that could go as far as toppling the government and destroy one of Swedens most important export companies. Its very risky, and its a risk no one wants to take, so the parts made in sweden are probably not compromised.
China, on the other hand has almost no risks associated with adding backdoor. No free press, hard suppression of whistle blowers, and since most foreign intelligence services already assume the equipment is compromised, there is no real reputational damage either. I assume they are all compromised, why wouldn't they be?
The US is somewhere in between.
Sometimes companies are compromised by intelligence services, but much more often I think its employees. Why try to change Tim Cooks stance on privacy, when all you need to do is find one Apple employee, willing to take a sack of money to "do their country a great service"?