It's just different use cases. Backdoors are more useful for targetted operations or specific data exfiltration, while plugging yourself to back bones is more useful for mass surveillance.

I don't even see why it's controversial to hold this opinion. Reading some comments, people seems to feel offended we could think that from the USA.

If anything, the USA are, with Russia and China, among the countries anybody in Europe like me would suspect the most about pulling things like this. The CIA and NSA have a terrible reputation, and the track record to support it.

We are talking about a country that went to war while lying about WMD against the UN vote, made money with south american cocaine while organizing coup after coup, elected Bush and Trump yet punished Chelsea Manning. A country that is still under the temporary 9/11 Patriot act, it used to mass spy on its entire population.

Of course I'm assuming the worse from them.

And yes, it's fair.

Actually, even if I were proven to be completely wrong in 10 years, it still would have been fair.

But I'm not even assuming that only from the US, but basically from any gov, including mine. Because history taught us that's what power does.

It's sane to be suspicious of people in power. Necessary for democracy, even.

But, and this is where the equivalency annoys me. You could literally end up in jail for saying some of these things about China in China. You could just as well talked about abuses of women and the me to movement, but the reason that hasn't happened in China may well be not that there men are somehow better behaved, but that they appear to have put a women who did come out with an accusation under house arrest until she agreed to stop talking about it. Yes the US has done and doubtless continues to do bad things, part of that comes just from having power which the US has had for a long time, part of that comes from truly bad people ect. But the Snowden leak happened in the US. US newspapers reported on it. College professors talked to their class about it. You can talk about it on this US hosted and owned website. None of that is true in China, right? So yes I am more skeptical of the US doing shady business when a large percentage of US citizens object to shady business and can talk about it than I am of China doing shady stuff when they've built their internet to insulate their government from as much criticism as possible

Yes, cancer is worse than diabetes.

Not the point.

The point of my comment is: I assume any gov to have such backdoor if they can.

Well, but we can assume with different probabilities. For sure there are people in every government who would if they could, but the fact that the US has mechanisms to expose this sort of thing and lots of people in individual companies who feel like you and there are still no stories of this, that is evidence that it isn't happening at least not at any sort of scale

> It's just different use cases.

That's a hand-wavy redirection that isn't relevant to the issue at hand, which is that:

There is no evidence of the US (and, in fact, many other large countries, with exceptions for e.g. Israel) installing backdoors and breaking into computers in order to steal intellectual property.

There is ample evidence of China doing exactly that, against a variety of targets (not just the US - they've taken things from Japan and the EU, among many others).

I wouldn't be surprised if every nation with a functioning Internet connection tries to put the hac on whatever they can.

But that's not the topic under discussions - the topic is stealing and commercializing IP, for which there is tons of evidence for China doing, and accusations of e.g. the Five-Eyes doing it are rampant speculation with absolutely no evidence included.

Yes, that includes your comment.

I never said I had evidence, I said it was fair play to speculate all gov do the same, given they lack of morale and fire power.

Which it is.

I suppose it's true that you said "speculate", because one can speculate that the sky is green when you're not looking - speculation doesn't necessarily have anything to do with reality. Fair enough.