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by wyuenho 2142 days ago
People suspected the NSA were snooping and introducing backdoors and proactively places countermeasures against that. Why should the standard be different when it comes to China?
1 comments

The standard shouldn't be any different and that's precisely the problem here:

* NSA is a governmental agency that by construction is tied to the state. Bytedance, Huawai and Tencent are privately owned companies in China and all "ties" to the Chinese governments are unsubstantiated. Blanket ban on private companies because of their country of origin and unsubstantiated suspicions results in clear discrimination and suppression of open competition in my mind.

* For my understanding, could you help by providing context on what specific counter-measures have been taken against NSA's intelligence effort based on people's suspicion?

People have been warning about BSafe and Dual_EC_DRBG for years before Snowden came along. Privacy advocates and security professionals had been placing out a blanket warning of "government" snooping for decades before Snowden. Richard Stallman, the guy who wrote most of the Gnu utils back in the days, had been signing his emails with M-x spook, which had been in Emacs since 1988. The Internet started out anti-spook way back in the days.