This is because of western sanctions. Chinese contributors are much more numerous and more important than any Russians ever were; and they’re also not a sanctioned country, so I highly doubt it

Uh they are sanctioned with more being added literally every year and once the US kicks off the planned war and decoupling against them in the next 4-5 years they’re going to throw down a wall of sanctions just like the one they threw on Russia and I bet you that Linus will cite legal once again in an opaque decision to remove them while crying about how evil the Chinese government is for oppression of Uyghurs, for reclaiming Taiwan after it declared independence at American urging and offered to host American nukes, etc, etc.

Oh they’ll let some back in, after they’ve signed a pledge that they are not associated with the Chinese military in any way (working for a company that supplies systems that are used by another company in a product that sells to the military counts), that they denounce their government and the communist party, that they are not Uyghurs or in Xin’jiang or associated with companies in Xin’jiang (as all enlightened westerners know all Uyghurs that were not killed in the totally real genocide are slaves so it’s not acceptable to use their work) and so on and so forth. Which will mean a shocking amount of their devs will be out and Linus will shrug and claim they made a choice to not take the simple step of siding with the west against their own people and therefore got what they got.

They of course hope to use such sanctions to force companies to gut-punch and weaken the Chinese military and state but having them choose to decouple from the west instead is also perfectly acceptable.

The west is pulling all its might to it, while it still has strength to do so. It will cut out Chinese developers but that doesn’t matter. If Linux desktop crashes and burns no matter because they only really need it for servers and Red Hat and other alphabet agency adjacent companies will keep those distros humming along on approved Intel/AMD/western hardware configurations.

They aim to then cut out China from Linux and hope the whole thing collapses and cannot be used for their own hardware meaning they’ll have to support a hard-forked kernel which many western planners doubtless think they won’t be able to do or it will at least hinder them badly for some time and more important draw a strong digital divide, a digital iron curtain between western Linux and users thereof and Chinese/Russian Linux and users thereof.

The planners of these things don’t care about some minor consequences, they’re in a life or death struggle, winner takes all, west comes out on top for another century+ of dominance and exploitation with western capital at the helm and white supremacy triumphing OR the multi-polar world emerges victorious and western hegemony and power collapses and with it their DoTB and their entire way of life and privilege.

Reshoring includes reshoring software jobs and if it’s important their thinking is someone will get paid to do it by some company, if it’s not paid for it clearly wasn’t important. This could cause problems for western corporations but it would likely be a down the road thing and most likely Valve or others would desperately try and keep Linux afloat just to have an alternative to Microsoft so they’re not destroyed by Windows locking down sales and apps via Windows store sales.

Viewed in light of this it seems likely they wanted to cement control of Telegram and the founder refused their advances.

It’s not enough for the US to be able to utilize a thing for their ends, they desire the ability to deny their enemies the same (which flies in the face of the liberal notion of freedom of speech not just for who you like but those you dislike). As well as probably wanting technical data and backdoors to identify both puppets and pawns as well as enemy groups they can target for surveillance, harassment, arrest, deplatforming, etc.

In light of these kinds of tactics one has to look at something like Tor with a skeptical eye. Maybe it was just made before all this was common practice. But I personally find those whisperings about the idea that 90% of exit nodes and other parts of the network are run by isnt’reali, US, and eyes intelligence agencies to allow de-anonymization on anyone but their people using it.

Anyway you look at it, this, the raid of Scott Ritter as well as the home of another RT host whose last hat was writing for a Nixonian realist conservative policy magazine, among many other actions and it seems the boot is coming down hard and fast. That is that the US firewall is being erected but unlike China’s which seeks merely to control their own information space, the US is clamping down hard on anyone but them speaking or coordinating, organizing, putting forth opinions. They’re no doubt incensed by the amount of conservatives in the US who view Russia sympathetically. The deranged agents of the FBI and so on who fully bought into the de-bunked Russia-gate hoax clearly see any sympathy as evidence of Russian meddling and the larger strategy moving above and beyond them of the state is to crush movements against its interests now.

From crushing Palestinian genocide protestors (and going so far as to punish the proles by banning medical face masks) to this they’re reaching out to crush and achieve total dominance on all fronts for all their narratives from their settler-colonial genocide-state isn’treal to the Russian antagonism, to China and beyond. That’s why we see a resurgence in pushing the Xinjiang genocide lie again as well I think.

And it’s why Tiktok was banned, why Kaspersky was banned (not sharing data with the NSA like US AV firms do), and why they’re now harassing this Telegram guy.

If it is true that Russia’s military is using it, they are very foolish to do so.

It’s doubtful it’s an official practice for field communications so much as soldiers using it on their own in ways that severely compromise operational security. It’s incredibly popular in Russia, much of the news we get on the Ukraine conflict is via official releases done on Telegram or Twitter by Russian state agencies.

That said maybe they’re using it in some semi-official capacity which is bad but at the same time this war kind of came out of nowhere. Russia doesn’t really have a lot of homegrown messaging apps. They can’t trust western stuff like Zuckerbook or Signal for obvious reasons and that leaves out most of the encrypted messaging clients. They could have rolled their own but that’s a vulnerability as any brand new and rushed software you create is more likely to have bugs that intelligence agencies from the west can exploit to take over devices, spy, break encryption, etc than something that’s at least been on the market a while. It does underline they /should/ develop something that can be used for these purposes that they control.

Well yes and no. SMS messages are readable by the carrier (both receiving and sending) and absolutely accessible to the FBI and NSA often without a warrant and they’re stored for 6-18 months or so by the carriers.

Telegram on the other hand to my knowledge still practices encryption in transit. Your connection and data you send to Telegram is over an encrypted connection like HTTPS. That means your carrier/ISP cannot see what you’re saying on Telegram just that you’re using it.

Is it completely secure against third parties, against Telegram itself being compromised? As in end to end encryption. No. And that’s why an arrest like this is particularly problematic as anyone who can coerce the company or someone with sufficient access can just get all this data from them as well as doing other things. But it does reduce the number of parties with easy access and raises the bar to gaining access somewhat. As evidenced by the Snowden leaks we can’t be sure any service that isn’t based entirely in an anti-imperialist core nation like China doesn’t have the NSA in the back siphoning up all the data or even just metadata.

As with many things there are degrees of security and privacy with encryption. SMS I’d consider as safe as shouting something in a public space. This I’d consider as safe as sending a UPS envelope with a message inside to someone. Properly implemented E2E I’d consider sending a UPS envelope but the contents inside are scrambled and unreadable except to your recipient who has a special decoder that UPS isn’t in possession of.

I know there’s a Plex program that does this, creates simulated channels filled with randomized (or via pre-defined criteria like action movies) channels that you can tune to. Might be something for Jellyfin that’s similar. Maybe not exactly what you’re after and if you don’t have a very large collection it won’t work that well but if you have hundreds of movies or shows it could look pretty random.

Exactly, once you’ve experienced it I just don’t get how anyone could go back except kicking and screaming but people want their slop I guess?

Cable is garbage. Just straight ad-infested low quality slop that has its production values slashed year over year. Goodness I sound old now but I do think back in the early 2000s when I was growing up that there was better quality and shorter commercials too.

Compare to ad-free service from two streaming services at $20/month each and you’re only paying $40 and getting no commercials, no interruptions, no wastes of your time and tons of content on demand on your schedule.

Add to that some sailing knowledge and you don’t have to worry about rotating services either.

The only thing I miss as a film nerd is TCM (also commercial free). Oh and PBS sometimes had good stuff though that’s not technically a cable channel.

Not prioritizing moderation and not locking down chat for anyone under a certain age is inexcusable. But when I see articles like this and see the law enforcement interviews I can’t help but smell a planted article to push for pulling back section 230 protections.

What that won’t do is hold big companies truly accountable. What it will do is push piracy, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-zionism, anything that goes against the mainstream narrative and could get companies even conceivably in trouble for hosting it (and I’m not talking just about reddit type hosting in that they provide the code, front-end, etc but any type of hosting including companies that host this lemmy instance) will lead to massive crack-downs on anything outside the mainstream. Which means us. Which means anti-imperialist speech, which means speech against the genocide of Palestinians, etc. Meanwhile take-downs for violent rhetoric from the reactionaries will as usually be untouched or left up a suspiciously long time before being pulled down.

Companies will pre-censor because right now they only get in trouble for not acting in a reasonable timeframe upon notice, if you lose that there is a strong incentive to vet and hit anything that anyone, even a bunch of online Nazi goons crying about commies who are terrorists without further evidence as reason to just stop doing business with that person or group and deplatform them immediately. The powerful will get a second chance and appeal, the powerless will be given the finger.

The problem as usual is capitalism and capitalists and their corporations. The solution as usual under capital we’re told we should believe and accept is strip everyone of their rights, further entrench the security state, pass enabling laws to allow better suppression of content that the state finds harmful and after a short period of success basically ignore the original stated reason for passing such things.

Capitalism cannot handle keeping kids safe. Capitalism is a pedophilia loving, pedophile enabling system.

Q-anon-anonymous. It’s a podcast.

Part of a long history. After WW2 the west gave away enigma machines to developing nations. They had by this point cracked it and thus could read the messages but told no one for decades.

They escaped because they don’t use the US intelligence connected backdoor company and DNC shill “crowdstrike” which lied about Russian actors attacking the DNC as part of the Russiagate hoax and banked off that for some time after.

They’d be deranged to use any US “security” company as they’re all full of “ex” NSA/CIA/FBI and a fat clear pipeline of info, spying enabling, etc back to those agencies. The US of course slanders the rest of the world with projection to cover up things like this, to cover up the Snowden revelations of them being an empire of spies. They say Chinese/Russian companies can’t be trusted because they have some people with friends in intelligence but no proof of these countries crossing the lines like the US did. No proof of hardware implants like the US did with Cisco to China. No proof that the US is anything but an extraordinary bad faith actor who can’t play by any rules but the rules of “one set of rules for me, another for thee”.

I fucking hate a lot of these next-gen endpoint detection and remediation companies. Them, Mandiant, other clowns in the US are little better than private sockpuppets of the CIA/FBI/US State department. Regularly claiming China or Russia hacked this or that which is so convenient for their masters. Never acting more circumspect about the evidence and declaring that they can’t be certain but it says x,y,z and letting people draw their own conclusions without raising geopolitical tensions as responsible actors should. Because they’re not responsible actors. They’re not even really security companies. They are organs of geopolitical containment, propaganda, messaging, and defense against the multipolar world and for US hegemony.

Please empire die already. Let me see free computing within my lifetime.

Probably fine but not the most ideal.

Right now the market for SSDs sucks. Before the latest price-gouging via chopping supply in half (Crucial happily going along with Samsung’s openly announced plans to do just that to get prices up) I got a 1TB TLC drive for $60, now they’re all $110+ without exception.

For a main OS drive where you’re getting lots of random reads on start-up and during normal operation, DRAM helps a decent amount to prevent waiting (with things like big games loading lots of files this is obvious as is on an OS disk where lots of random reads occur as part of normal operations). It’s definitely something I think most people would notice between an NVMe drive with DRAM vs one without. Maybe not as much vs a SATA SSD under most work-loads.

Also OP you should realize most SATA SSD’s (even cheap ones that were name-brand), except ones in the last few years typically had a DRAM cache, it used to be standard, it’s only with NVMe that they’ve started dropping it to save money because the write/read speeds on NVMe drives sorta mask the lack of it under many but not all workloads (particularly for extra drives people were buying for non-OS installs like drives just to put games or large files on that are in addition to their main drive it matters less).

With that TBW I’d suspect it’s a QLC drive (and confirmed by searching). I always used to avoid them myself but these days with these prices if you’re looking for a deal it may be hard not to though the combination of QLC and no DRAM makes me think it’s less than ideal for an OS drive. Just make sure you have a decent back-up plan for important documents and files to another drive or the cloud as when SSD’s fail (and even good MLC/TLC drives can) they do so catastrophically and you won’t be able to recover a thing.

For reference QLC/TLC/MLC stands for quad-level, triple-level, multi-level(2). There’s also SLC or single-level. SLC is the oldest and most reliable, charges stay stable longer, the whole platter is more stable. Each increase decreases the cost per GB but hits reliability. The less bits per cell the more stable it tends to be, less prone to charge flips, better write speed potentials, it degrades more slowly and has more re-write cycles. But it costs more of course.

MLC is very pricey, easily twice the price per terabyte, but TLC is usually only a bit of a premium, maybe another $20-$30 (the T500 from Crucial for instance has DRAM and it’s TLC for $35 more which isn’t cheap admittedly but I guess it depends on where you are financially and if you plan to use this for a while. There’s also the SK hynix Gold P31 which is TLC, DRAM, and $5 cheaper than the T500 at least where I looked).

Verdict: If you’re looking for something in this price range (<$80) then definitely go with what you’ve chosen. However if you game or want something a bit more reliable with higher TBW, a bit faster, and with DRAM so you don’t have to worry about that bottleneck on an OS drive AND you can afford the extra money I’d consider strongly something TLC, with DRAM, or both, like the drives I mentioned.

It’s a censorship and surveillance panopticon.

Maybe just don’t use it? Especially don’t use it if you’re on the left? Especially, especially don’t use it for news and organizing if you’re on the left?

I can get the argument (though I don’t respect it and I’ve never let it decide for me) that you need to keep Zuckerbook to keep in contact with grandma. I don’t get the argument that it’s a great place to find an anti-imperialist news feed or to organize people when it’s so transparently hostile and so deeply in bed with the US security state.

You want to view content from Russian funded news, Chinese news, anti-imperialist news? There are these neat things called websites and this other neat thing called the fediverse.

If you have to change a setting you’ve already lost the majority of people and that’s the point of censorship and propaganda, not to control all the people all the time but enough of them.

They’ll just not apply it to them either in statue or simply obviously not have their sanctions enforcement people take action, there are two options there. I guess they could also give them exemptions which they’d create a legal means for but that seems more hassle than just not enforcing it (who’s going to complain? what president or lawmakers will try to force their hand?) or creating a carve-out.

Fact is US has been ignoring one-China principle for forever. They recognize it in order to have relations but then sell weapons and their top officials are always talking about helping Taiwan “defend democracy” and so on.

If the ban carves out an exception for Taiwan wouldn’t that escalate the tensions

No. The US has done far more provocative things and China always warns about red lines then does nothing or at most snubs the US a little. If China is ever going to escalate and hit the US hard with a retaliatory move that’s more than a token gesture they’ll do so for far more reason than that like the sanctions themselves existing or something. A carve-out for Taiwan won’t matter one bit in the overarching calculus of relations with the US as has been shown time and again by China. The only thing that might make China actually react is either the US moving to station a large number of troops there or build a major base or moving nukes there or the DPP types declaring independence or the US openly urging them to do so. Those are the only things that would really change the calculus of the status quo that China and the US has where China tolerates US provocations and separatism and weapons sales.

They don’t have to totally outlaw FOSS. They just do what they did to Iran. They outlaw exports of it to China, force companies hosting it to do their utmost to block Chinese IP addresses, make it illegal and subject to sanction and total blockade if any Chinese company or any of their suppliers use open source code in violation of US sanctions on its use by China as a sanctioned country and jail any US persons who help them do so.

Their goal is a bifurcated world. They’ve stated decoupling but many thought they meant taking away manufacturing of wires and cables and chemicals while I think increasingly they meant the following. They control the heights right now, they have the patents on the processors everyone uses for gaming PCs, for smart devices, for phones, etc. They have the big social media companies, they have the big OS in Windows and IOS and Android. They have NVIDIA and it’s architecture which has advantages for AI among other fields. Architectures that most software is built to run on. They gate that, kick the Chinese out and then tell everyone they’ve expanded the clean network initiative to be clean technology. No company who does business with the US or uses US tech (it will come with a license specifying this) may use Chinese processors, Chinese operating systems, Chinese applications of certain types, etc. They will then shop this around. Europe, Australia, NZ, Japan, occupied Korea as their vassals will instantly sign up and agree not to engage with China in high technology at all. Other countries will be presented with a choice: choose the US, get all the applications, operating systems, shiny iphone, etc that you’re used to OR sign up with China, be banned from using or buying any of those, have sanctions slapped on you just for good measure, color revolution attempts and other reprisals. They’ll allow certain stringent and expensive exceptions for companies that have to do business with China, probably force security measures, separate networks, no interaction between western and Chinese outside transferring data in a very cumbersome way with logging and classification duties required with books for inspection to have a real burden, etc. Any country or business found in violation will have its licenses yanked, have its assets seized, and all the usual heavy-handed sanctions regime stuff.

As we’ve seen with Microsoft and their enshittifying Windows most people choose the path of least resistance.

This doesn’t result in an instant win condition for the west but it buys them time and leverage and inflicts pain on China and its allies and it slaps up a wall between peoples, software, networks, etc. At the very least it keeps western people firmly under their control, the control of an increasingly locked down, backdoored, spy-mandated tech sphere so they can keep a lid on those uppity proles and their organizing. And I think part of them thinks it will cause discontent among the Chinese people that they can’t have their treats, discontent among the Russian people they can’t have western treats because they use an alternative OS.

They were on this path anyways with trying to outlaw encryption exports in the 90s. They just have gotten back on it, it’s all 90s stuff all over again, the banning VPNs, the crackdowns, we’ll soon find out something or other has a clipper chip in it that no one mentioned.

This is an impediment, a snare, a serious annoyance and problem that will be surmounted but it buys the west time and distance to get ahead which is their whole plan (keeping China 10 years behind them technologically). Of course they have the serious issue of greed and incompetence in western companies versus Chinese state efforts so it won’t work but it’s going to make computing in the west absolutely miserable within the next 5-10 years.

They’re unironically doing the open source = communism thing. Close off the source, close off cooperation, disallow Americans to use anything the Chinese are working on because it doesn’t have NSA back doors that all true patriot anti-communists would allow with glee on their machines.

This, the restrict act, the tik-tok ban, the walls are really closing in and liberals are dropping any pretenses of the vaunted freedoms they’ve been crowing about since 1990. Bad times are coming and fast comrades, the violence of empire turning inwards, the repression will be dialed up, the choices will be taken away. And you know what? Many liberals will cheer for it, the Russia propaganda and axis of evil stuff has really broken their brains, they think this is to protect them from Trump or Trumpism as if that was ever a real threat to anything but empire. Meanwhile 100% American pre-Trump reaction will continue building apace.

Too many if’s to my mind for my thinking personally. They can’t control everything. If I was a ghoul and was presented with this speculative limited hang-out plan I’d immediately object that they can’t assure that some other country or genuine privacy actors wouldn’t develop and deploy some run-away popular app or platform that’s not backdoored and cause headaches.

As to false sense of security, hardly needed. Look how many people think discord is private and secure and use it to openly do crime, to openly do other ridiculous stuff and get caught with their pants down despite discord never making any claims anywhere that it was e2e. Lots of criminals still don’t use these services, it’s hardly pushed them onto them entirely. After that encrochat affair that turned out to be a police op many of them are very suspicious of these things as well.

If anything I think doing this would flood their fish in a barrel strategy with unwanted fish. Before this came out who used strong encryption privacy services? Pedophiles, terrorists, some small amount of political dissidents, criminals, a handful of extreme privacy practitioners and info-sec experts and followers. Who uses these services now? The above plus little Johnny who heard something about spying and is afraid of someone telling his mom he’s looking at pictures of naked women online. The above plus some corpo guy doing minor uninteresting white collar crime who thinks the extra precautions are worth it. And on and on. In other words I think if the goal was a watering hole attack type thing to get interesting types all they’ve done is pollute it with more noise.

I just don’t see them going out of their way to sabotage the police in the way they have because even if all the major privacy services are backdoored or ops, the police still can’t get them with warrants whereas before they could. Before the police could get certain zucker-book chat data, not so much anymore now that they turned on chat encryption for some of their services. The only way I could see this making sense is if they want to use it as a part of a push to regulate and outlaw encryption entirely, to push up criminal use of these services even incidentally and get a push to bring them all under control but that’s also an if and as we see as of yet 10 years later that hasn’t materialized.

The chilling effects argument is the only other one besides the encryption accelerationist one I think that has real merit, if they thought silencing and intimidating the populace was important given rising tensions I wouldn’t be shocked. Though the problem I have with that is why expose everything? Why expose the hardware implants via mail intercept in Cisco devices shipped to China when blowing that has nothing to do with letting Americans know of US metadata collection programs like Prism which are spying on them? That’s blowing a major foreign intelligence op and not just that making it so other countries you could have spied on won’t trust to buy these things from you given your past behavior constraining your future actions as well.

I’ve seen this called a limited hang-out but I really don’t see the point of it.

Unless the US has somehow developed some super secret beyond next generation sci-fi level hacking capabilities that no one else could possibly see coming and is trying to distract with these old school methods to redirect I just don’t see the point of doing this and alarming everyone, putting them on guard and creating pushes at the national level in key enemies like Russia and China to try and protect themselves with domestic production and at the level of the EU to attempt to see American tech as threatening.

I think the safer explanation is the US is somewhat sloppy, their capitalist nature led them to outsource some of this stuff and eventually someone like Snowden who had these beliefs came into contact with it after not being screened well enough or developing them and did what he did. It’s like saying the scientists who leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets were acting at US government behest as a limited-hang-out.

I just don’t see the point as I don’t think there was any vast exposure of this kind of thing coming from meaningful quarters. Like if the Chinese had come out with a big explosive accusation, even with evidence it would have been ignored by the western media, brushed off as propaganda and an intelligence ploy and I’m not aware of any thing in the works that would have been a bigger and more explosive exposure.

What would be the point? More things are encrypted, more private companies and individuals take pains to use encryption less likely to be backdoored. What to push people onto Signal which is backdoored or something? When before this most people would have just used unencrypted messengers that could be subpoenaed in open court without the issues of parallel construction?

I don’t really buy it and I haven’t seen a good argument for it.

If the Chinese played dirty with hardware implants or baked in at the factory malware or hard-coded credentials we’d have a smoking gun by now. The US or one of its top cybersecurity companies (are stacked to the gills by the way with “former” NSA/CIA/FBI people) would have exposed such a thing, it would be on NBC and CNN, they’d have an extensive break-down, they’d have pictures of the chip in question or at least the standard industry publishing of a breakdown of the modules, names, fact they had to come from the factory, etc. Yet we don’t have that. In a supposedly open, supposedly democratic society (nonsense of course) we don’t have that.

You say the data is worth too much. It’s no good if you get caught though. That’s the rule of all spying. Only the US is actually insulated from consequences and had a head start, they had a massive technical advantage on their enemies.

Look at the sanctions the US can slap on countries, the massive economic punishment, the devastation to their market-shares they could inflict and have inflicted on Russia for the war for example and are inflicting on China without evidence.

US had all the reasons and means. They had dominance of high technology, it was use them and their compromised European allies who were eyes agreements partners or live in the dirt. There was no choice, they had everyone over the barrel of a gun so even if they had been caught for a long time the risk was minimal. Chinese and Russian companies exist in the context of intense competition with the west and always have, trying to claw their way up for market-share.

You are propagandized.

I think the Russians would play dirtier if they could but they can’t. Material reality (the reality you liberals choose to ignore for your idealism infused fantasies constructed purely out of their projectionist propaganda designed to equivocate on their uniquely violating actions) constrains and limits them, threatens them, controls them. Something that doesn’t apply to an empire like the US that after the collapse of the USSR was THE global hegemon and we know constructed the eyes agreements, we know applies pressure, we know blackmails, bribes, utilizes friendly intelligence agencies for full spectrum dominance.

The Chinese and Russians are regional players, they have interests in regional security and power. The US is the hegemon that cannot settle for most of the world it must have it all because that is the nature of capitalist greed, some is never enough, it must always be more and any competitor anywhere is always a threat to greater profits.

this is not an east vs west issue.

It really is though and I think it’s a little naive to be saying that or buying the propaganda of the Eyes agreement nations frankly which of course has an inherent interest in portraying all its enemies as just as bad as it. Just as they did when they justified MKultra and every other heinous shitty thing they’ve done. Yet when the USSR archives opened after their fall we found out they weren’t doing half of the things the CIA said they were and using to justify their own abhorrent behavior.

If it wasn’t East vs West China wouldn’t have gotten caught with their pants down with the USA mass mail intercepting Cisco devices and putting hardware implants into them. I think one of the reasons they even allowed Cisco to help China with the great firewall is because they knew they could use it to spy. Because they would have thought along similar lines and known to look harder.

Fact is America, NATO, Eyes agreements countries spy more, more pervasively, they violate norms, business agreements, etc.

I fully believe that the Chinese and Russians hack but I don’t think they play dirty like the US does.

They don’t have global intercept networks, they don’t globally tap fiber lines, they don’t implant malware in as many places as possible, they don’t put backdoors in their hardware which could get caught and get them banned (notice how western accusations are never backed up with any kind of solid proof smoking gun stuff? Yet we have Snowden as proof of how far the US and its vassals go). They don’t do this kind of mixing of trade and spying, hurting, using their industries and private companies as weapons. They see it as separate business which was historically how spying was seen.

And I further know this because we know from NSA whistleblowers that they had in the early 2000s a choice. Two paths advocated by alternative factions. One path was the one they took, spy on everyone, everywhere, all the time without exception, gather every ounce of data you can, invade everyone’s private lives, spy on allies and enemies alike and then sift through the data after. The other which this whistleblower advocated was selective spying, getting warrants basically, getting mandates for spying for specific purposes. Targeted operations, targeted malware. So it’s hardly hard to see the idea that these other countries might take another path, even if you think they’re evil and worse than the US, you have to admit, pragmatically they have less resources, less ability to do these kinds of things even if they wanted to.

Fact is one of these two groups of nations is in a position to do all this stuff, is an empire, was the global hegemon after the fall of the USSR and decided to invade everyone’s privacy in an attempt to maintain that power at all costs. And it isn’t China or Russia. Equivocating here simply does not fit the facts of the global situation as we know them.