[chinese_donald]

"Companies and governments need clear rules on when a hack counts as acceptable espionage or an act of aggression -- or an act of war."

Rules? Russian and Chinese hackers aren't going to care about any rules of conduct. As long as our government isn't spying on its own citizens without warrants, I really don't care what they do in terms of hacking the computers of foreign actors.

This is actually a really good cyber security plan.

[kafkaesq]

But thanks to the "new era of constructive co-operation" with Russia, we won't have to worry about Russian hackers (at least) anymore.

[thephyber]

> I really don't care what they do in terms of hacking the computers of foreign actors.

What if your American company was hacked and your devices were used as a proxy to stage an attack on another American company?

Your statement just gave the downstream company your tacit authorization to hack you back in order to "swim upstream" to find the original hacker. Or to destroy their IP on your compromised device. Or to destroy your device altogether

> This is actually a really good cyber security plan.

Nothing in this "cyber security plan" looks any different than what we already know about the Obama cyber security plan. And Trump's cybersecurity advisor (General Flynn) doesn't think it's possible that the FBI could scan 650,000 emails from Anthony Weiner's computer to search for known recipients, keywords, or to de-duplicate the corpus.[1]

> As long as our government isn't spying on its own citizens without warrants

Where have you been for the past decade?

The US government (at federal, state, and local levels) is already spying on citizens "without warrants" and it is increasingly being done for common crime or pre-crime, as opposed to the "anti-terrorism" efforts with which these technologies and policies were originally sold to the public.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The FISA court has been accused of being a rubber-stamp (only 0.03% of all warrant requests have been denied in 30-something years), all the judges are appointed by one Republican SCOTUS justice, and until last year there was no adversarial concept in the FISA court. It is no longer a "one suspect, one warrant" world.

[1] https://twitter.com/GenFlynn/status/795392694411468800

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog-...

[3] http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2013/06/07/6_7_13_president_oba...

[4] https://www.aclu.org/blog/documents-reveal-unregulated-use-s...

[5] http://jalopnik.com/san-joses-garbage-trucks-may-do-police-s...

[6] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/even-fbi-privacy-concerns-lice...

[7] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...

[9] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/06/nation/la-na-secret-...

[10] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/national-gu...

[11] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/what-you-need-know-abo...

[12] http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/13/10758380/stingray-surveill...

[13] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/you-ma...

[14] https://noglobalwarrants.org

The 4th Amendment is largely dead. The government can access all of your metadata (snail mail, email, phone calls, SMS messaging, social media messaging, etc) is tantamount to being followed by a full-time private detective, only they can do it affordably at scale.

Even if you don't think your metadata is worth getting worked up about, thermal scopes, your electrical usage, sniff dogs on your front porch, stingrays that affect all cell phone users within their radius. And everything is digital, so there is potential for future abuse both within and without the agency that collects the data.

[chinese_donald]

"Your statement just gave the downstream company your tacit authorization to hack you back in order to "swim upstream" to find the original hacker. Or to destroy their IP on your compromised device. Or to destroy your device altogether"

Do you actually think this is the only way the government knows that an attack took place from a foreign actor?

Botnets exist and our government knows full well that it's an infected machine and not the user of that machine that's attacking websites on the Internet.

"And Trump's cybersecurity advisor (General Flynn) doesn't think it's possible that the FBI could scan 650,000 emails from Anthony Weiner's computer to search for known recipients, keywords, or to de-duplicate the corpus.[1]"

In 8 days? I'm suspect as well that they could actually comb through all of the required emails in only 8 days. I'm not sure if you are intentionally trying to mislead with your comment, but the link you provided doesn't show us that he didn't think the government could do it. Only that it seems unlikely that the government could get through all of the emails in 8 days.

"Where have you been for the past decade?"

Living through the Obama administration and his piss-poor policies on user privacy. My point was that I am trying to be optimistic about Trump's presidency and I hope these things change.

"Even if you don't think your metadata is worth getting worked up about, thermal scopes, your electrical usage, sniff dogs on your front porch, stingrays that affect all cell phone users within their radius. And everything is digital, so there is potential for future abuse both within and without the agency that collects the data."

I don't even want my Metadata being used by the government. I am 100% for privacy of US citizens.