They have wiretapped the entire world with PRISM and other similar secret programs. They have seized and vanished a countless number of people to black site secret prisons.
Highlighting the crimes of actor B to excuse the crimes of actor A is not "pointing out hypocrisy", it's an attempt to excuse a crime and confuse the conversation.
You certainly should be worried if a future UK government turns out to be a drastically more coercive nature than the present. And that's on the cards.
I think based on the conversation you can view, this entire thread has been derailed. whataboutism confirmed, no one is discussing the article and now this thread that _should_ be discussed here will get erased from the front page.
>“Once you own the router, you own all the traffic, to include the chance to harvest credentials and passwords,” said Howard Marshall, deputy assistant director of the cyber division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “It is a tremendous weapon in the hands of an adversary.”
if this were true, more effort needs to be done to encrypt traffic fully, not enabling it to be broken with trusted certificates but disabling the ability in the first place (application) from being decrypted.
"Whataboutism" is just a buzzword for people who want to avoid looking at issues holistically. "Evil Actor A says look out for Evil Actor B" warrants the response "well, they're both evil actors".
It's really kind of hard to harm Russia more than it manages to harm itself. Yes, Hitler did manage to kill more Russians than Stalin did, but you could also lay the blame for at least some of that at Stalin's door, through the purges in the thirties.
Yes, I was trying to give Russia at least a little bit of wiggle room there... but honestly, they've done far more damage to themselves than anybody has done to them, pretty much throughout their history.
there is when it derails conversation. this is called whataboutism.
we can have a separate conversation about that separate issue which I agree needs to be addressed, but not in this thread..
if you need help understanding what whatboutism is here is a great john oliver explanation [0] that will help why this is bad and that pointing out hypocrisy does not create a moral equivalency.
please try to focus on the conversation, and open up a new thread on the issue you would like to discuss, not here.
Russia isn’t part of the liberal order. They’ve done things like leak tapped phone calls to the press (“fuck the EU”) and they’re less likely to care about collateral damage. Nato already has the worlds most reliable and powerful military so as things go cyber physical there isn’t a delta in terms of power balance for them, but there is for Russia and countries that nerve agent attack on foreign soil already show a lack of restraint. We shouldn’t take it lightly.
The bad actions of the US and their allies does not excuse the same actions of Russia (or China, or any other country).