[mschuster91]

The US had a wiretap on Merkel. Do you think Russia, China, Germany, Israel, Iran and North Korea don't have the same on every other major political figure?

Let's face the truth: none of us is safe. Everything we do, even if we are just oedinary 9-5 office workers and not politicians or activists, is ending up recorded somewhere.

The only way out would be a nation-state effort of open source: everything from the VHDL of the chips over firmware to the OS, and enough money to fund audits of all components. At least, users could then somewhat trust at least their clients, and treat the network as a dumb leaky network of pipes.

[boomboomsubban]

>. Do you think Russia, China, Germany, Israel, Iran and North Korea don't have the same on every other major political figure?

Do you think US intelligence don't also have the same? We've already seen a sitting US president hire intelligence agents to bug his enemies and political rivals, it's not like there's any reason to suspect that was a one time occurrence.

[pessimizer]

Leaders under more authoritarian governments don't have to answer to rando voters. They only have to answer to their country's elites, who support what they're doing.

[boomboomsubban]

The intelligence agencies don't answer to voters either, they only answer to the countries elite who they've been shown to spy on.

[SquishyPanda23]

> We've already seen a sitting US president hire intelligence agents to bug his enemies and political rivals,

Do you have a source for this claim?

[boomboomsubban]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal

[SquishyPanda23]

Ha sorry, I just realized you must have meant Watergate. I misread your original comment as saying it was about the current sitting president.