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> The impression I have — and I’d be very interested to find out if
I’m right or wrong — is that governments basically all spy on each
other all the time Yes. That's exactly what NSA, GCHQ, MI6 etc are tasked to do.[1] The problem came when foreign intelligence got confused with domestic
intelligence. This is further compounded by the change in procurement
of specialist technologies that the army or government offices might
once have had. In the 80s a prime-minister would communicate with a
special "scrambler" (supplied by the security services and designed
against foreign espionage). Today everyone uses the same gear made in
China, and the market for offensive cyberweapons is both international
and privatised. Here is a quote from [2] "" For complex reasons the US embargo on Huawei, while looking like
a trade dispute, more or less proves this. Simply; western phones
have backdoors and remote controls for western governments. Chinese
phones have backdoors for Communist Party intelligence
apparatus. Each spies on their own citizens and everybody is happy
(except the citizens that end up in camps). It's the presence of the
other's spyware within the respective borders/markets that is the
problem, do you see?
So when these powers fell out, or failed to reach agreement on data
sharing, this escalated into an issue with clear symmetry. We see
that products by Apple, Google or Amazon are to be trusted no more
than Huawei handsets. Indeed, the safest phone for a Chinese citizen
is probably an Apple iPhone, whereas the safest phone for a western
civilian would be a Huawei, because historically, people are most
risk from their *own* government's domestic surveillance than a
foreign government's international surveillance. ""
The upshot of this is that offensive cyberweapons, which are
indiscriminate, persistent, reusable and infinitely replicatable at
near zero cost (all the worst qualities of a weapon on par with
bioweapons) affect all strata of society. Politicians, military
generals, schoolteachers and pizza delivery guys are equally exposed.
This marks a significant transition that blurs the boundaries between
civil and military war, as the current Russo-Ukraine conflict shows.
We're all soldiers now.[1] https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20... [2] https://digitalvegan.net |