[celsoazevedo]

So, according to you, they (agencies from US, China, Russia, etc) never cross lines that you and me would never cross? They never tried to broke security, sabotage, ..., or hack someone?

I'm not talking about moon or UFO's conspiracies. I'm talking about things that, according to leaks and official documents, they already did in the past and keep doing today.

[Karunamon]

And we have evidence of those things.

This is something else. Basic rationality demands that we not treat something as truth until we have evidence of it.

The existence of bad actors does not mean an abandonment of critical thinking! Critical thinking in this case tells us that compromising a git repo is a horrible idea, mostly because even if you broke SHA and even if you managed to slip the code in undetected, the jig is up the moment somebody makes a conflicting change in that file, wonders what's going on, and then discovers that the server copy does not jibe with the local copy.

[celsoazevedo]

And I agree with you.

But we can't blindly defend governments, agencies or countries and attack someone just because their opinion or ideia doesn't fit on the "official version".

There is also a big deference between what I did (considering the ability to do something) and accuse them of doing something. You don't need evidence to think if they can or not do it.

[diminoten]

> I'm talking about things that, according to leaks and official documents, they already did in the past and keep doing today.

Please cite an official document that shows the US government forcing GitHub to secretly modify the source code of a project in one of its repos.

As far as I'm aware, they've literally never done that, and to suggest they have means you have to show evidence that such a thing has taken place.

This is some Fox News level bullshit. "How do we know the FBI hasn't raped and murdered a girl in 1990? They've never come out and specifically stated they haven't!"

[celsoazevedo]

diminoten, you started by comparing one of @balls2you questions to a plan/plot/conspiracy. I commented saying that just because it's something you think that no government would ever do, doesn't means that they don't do it. I compared it to the NSA leaks, because until Snowden, everyone that talked about NSA (and other agencies) controlling the internet was called crazy. Now we now that those guys weren't that crazy.

I'm not saying that the US (or other country) government did change some code on some repo on Github, what I'm saying is: if they want, they can do it legally or illegally. Do you understand my comment now?

[diminoten]

I've always understood your comment, what I don't agree with is the need to state it now.

When we make statements, we do so with context, and in this context, stating "the US government could do X" is implying that, yes, in fact the US government did do X.

Furthermore, saying "we don't know they didn't" is a specious argument, at best, because it suggests they did do X, when in reality they're no more likely to have done X, than I am to have done Y, which is some arbitrary other thing which is, while in the realm of possiblity, a complete waste of time to consider.

There exists, within the set of possible things, a set of things which are not among the greater set of things one must consider. The US government secretly forcing GitHub to modify source code in one of their repositories is one of those things that we can safely not consider, even though it is, you're right, technically and politically possible.

[mikekchar]

On the other hand, consider a computer system. If you wish to have a secure computer system, you try to design it in such a way so as to make undesired behaviour impossible. For example, we spend a lot of effort looking at weaknesses in our systems and saying, "Well, someone could overflow this buffer here and get root access". Our reasoning is that if it is possible, it is probably only a matter of time before someone actually exploits it.

So while I completely relate to your feeling of trying to avoid conspiracy theory fantasies of "how do we know they haven't done that", I think it is probably not a good idea to say, "[this] is one of those things that we can safely not consider, even though it is... technically and politically possible".

Whether or not it has happened in the past, we probably don't want it to be possible and we probably should consider to consequences of what would happen if the government decided to take that action. 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,' and all that rot.

[MCRed]

"Good germans," even years after war, were certain there's no way their government could have perpetrated something like the holocaust and were convinced it was just allied propaganda.

Hence the phrase "good germans" for people who believe anything the government tells them, without question, despite the history of government criminal activity, pretty much nonstop going back to the revolution. (Hell, imposing the constitution was done by a coup, there was no mechanism for replacing the prior government, so they just did it with fait accompli. That said, I wish we operated under that constitution, then there would be no need for these reports to reveal just how many people's (in bands of 250) constitutional rights are being violated.)