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by AnthonyMouse 4174 days ago
It isn't a war. Nobody dies.

There is nothing for US government agencies to do. When a bank gets robbed because they held their money in a cardboard box instead of a vault, the question is not what the FBI can do to prevent that. The location of the problem is not the government. The location of the problem is the cardboard box.
1 comments
diminoten 4174 days ago
What?

These aren't some random bank robbers, these are entire countries.

What the hell do I pay the US government for, if not to protect me from other nations?

No one even has remotely enough budget to deal with foreign nations attacking them. Not Google, not Microsoft, nobody.

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AnthonyMouse 4174 days ago
> These aren't some random bank robbers, these are entire countries.

Sony's annual revenue is more than North Korea's GDP. That there can be a legitimate question as to whether the Sony attack was carried out by North Korea or some individual with a grudge probably puts it into the proper context.

> What the hell do I pay the US government for, if not to protect me from other nations?

That's a fair point; maybe we shouldn't pay them as much.

> No one even has remotely enough budget to deal with foreign nations attacking them. Not Google, not Microsoft, nobody.

So budget is the issue then? Maybe you're on to something here -- we can cut the NSA's budget and give the money to Google and Microsoft and other tech companies so they can use it to improve security.

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diminoten 4174 days ago
I'm glad you think you can spitball solutions to global issues better than folks who do it for a living.

That must feel good, for you.

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AnthonyMouse 4173 days ago
Right, sorry, I was mistaking this for a democracy. We should definitely just do whatever the man from the government said and not think about it too hard.

But remind me again how the military is going to defend against the likes of the Sony attack?

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diminoten 4173 days ago
Well, considering this is a representative democracy, we actually kind of should do what the folks we elect to tell us what to do say we should do.

If we don't like what they're telling us to do, we can always pick different people.

But anyway, the military isn't going to do the same thing they've always done with intelligence -- liaise with civilian government orgs to gather intel and ultimately launch operations based on that intel.

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AnthonyMouse 4173 days ago
> If we don't like what they're telling us to do, we can always pick different people.

On what basis are the voters supposed to make that decision? What we see is that our representatives take money from defense contractors and then do what those defense contractors want them to do. If they have a good reason for that they aren't sharing it.

That's the problem you're ignoring. "We can't tell you because it's a secret" is something they can trivially say when the actual reason is blatant corruption. Doing what defense contractors want for the same reason we subsidize corn in Iowa is indistinguishable from having an actual reason when the actual reason is secret. Which means we either have to assume that having no public reason implies corruption, or have no defense from corruption and consequently prolific corruption. And we can't have a corrupt and unaccountable military, that is totally crazy.

So what you're really saying is that they either have to give us the reason (or end the programs) or we need to "pick different people". Which is kind of what I'm saying.

> But anyway, the military isn't going to do the same thing they've always done with intelligence -- liaise with civilian government orgs to gather intel and ultimately launch operations based on that intel.

What operations? There is no military operation you can launch to prevent someone from breaking into a computer when you don't even know they've done it until after it's already over. You don't have a time machine.

This isn't a military problem. Look at the real world analogy of what they're afraid of: It's like a foreign government having a spy infiltrate an American company and steal their private documents. The defense from that has to be from inside that company. You can't solve it from the top down.

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