If they entirely cut us off from the internet by bricking our routers, maybe we would declare war.
GP said it would be an act of war. That definition doesn't mean the victim has to declare war on the aggressor, does it?
I feel inclined to agree with other comments saying this boils down to childish morality: "everyone else is doing it."
If you're not intending to make any sort of moral argument, but simply one of consistency in policy, then consider that people are taking issue with their NSA committing an "act of war" on a volatile country they are not at war with. It's different than some friendly mutual hacking with, say, France. What gives NSA the right to make that call and hope it doesn't blow up in the entire nation's face? And if it was sanctioned "from on high", we can still be angry that our elected officials and their appointees would do such a thing.
If there was a civil war going on in the US and disrupting the internet was likely to lead to loss of life then we might have a comparable situation. That isn't the situation though.
I am making a note of the fact that you view the Chinese government as a good barometer of morality in readiness for the next time you bring up their human rights record.
What a strange comment. You appear to believe that you can sum up the human rights characteristics of entire countries by the answer to a single question about routers.
Here's a characteristic of Chinese human rights that isn't captured by that question: it is the official policy of China that the police can convict and sentence its citizens to a year of labor camp ("reeducation through labor") without a trial. I find that characteristic more important in assessing Chinese civil liberties than the fact that they have obviously owned up a bunch of our routers.
> it is the official policy of China that the police can convict and sentence its citizens to a year of labor camp ("reeducation through labor") without a trial.
They would have nuked us, if they had been able to. It was total-war. In a war for survival - which is what most of WW2 was - there are very few things off-limits.
How does that situation have anything to do with today?
Today we're in a "war against terror". It too is total war, where there are very few things off-limits. The US has been implicated in torture, industrial espionage, world-wide surveillance and the killing of innocent civilians.
The "terrorists" (pick your current flavor of the month) are implicated in almost the same list of behaviours, excepting the global surveillance, due to lack of resources.
We aren't currently engaged in some kind of gentleman's war, playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules.
GP said it would be an act of war. That definition doesn't mean the victim has to declare war on the aggressor, does it?
I feel inclined to agree with other comments saying this boils down to childish morality: "everyone else is doing it."
If you're not intending to make any sort of moral argument, but simply one of consistency in policy, then consider that people are taking issue with their NSA committing an "act of war" on a volatile country they are not at war with. It's different than some friendly mutual hacking with, say, France. What gives NSA the right to make that call and hope it doesn't blow up in the entire nation's face? And if it was sanctioned "from on high", we can still be angry that our elected officials and their appointees would do such a thing.