:-D
Report: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/re...
Consider the incentives. Surveillance is costly. The only way to justify increasing surveillance costs is to demonstrate increasing intervention in criminal activity. If traditional crime is reduced, new crimes need to be introduced.
Once all the enemies of the state have been eliminated, it becomes mandatory to introduce new enemies of the state so they, too, can be rounded up. Eventually there will be no one left to come for and the surveillance technology will go unmonitored.
In my experience, it's social crises that tend to be used to justify authoritarian power grabs - whether that's a political killing or a worldwide contagion.
One might be tempted towards the conclusion that dystopian surveillance doesn't materially impact crime rates and that if we want to solve the latter, we need a different solution than the former.
The bigger question is: why would you expect the US not to be the largest investor? CNE vendors are tech companies. The US is the largest investor in tech companies.
Mostly because $FAV_TECH_COMPANY constantly tells me they love privacy. They fight backdoors in court, they rush out security patches and closely coordinate with the government to ensure I'm safe. Every advertisement seems to reinforce the idea that they cared about my security, I guess I put too much faith in the principles of private enterprise.
Don't take my word for it, though. Scroll through the rest of the comments in this thread, I counted all of three unique users that took this article at face-value. The fact that we see this cognitive dissonance on HN should really reinforce how unimportant online security is to Silicon Valley.
It's a direct answer to the question you posed, which was email-quoted in the first line of the comment.
It relates the point of view of someone who's substantially tech-ignorant and -in part because they simply don't have time or energy to think much on the topic- entirely unaware of how the intelligence and infosec world works. People like that make up a somewhat-surprising fraction of the US population. Sometimes folks who work in computers are a member of this subset of the population!
Whether there's any overlap between them and enemies of the people will heavily depend on the latter's ability to steer towards good governance. The track record for the past few decades hasn't been great.
1) If you're counting investment, you should count it in dollars, not number of investors or corporate entity locations.
2) This is missing at least two extremely well-known CNE vendors, which makes me doubt its accuracy.
3) The takeaway from the graph on Mythical Beasts [1] should be that the industry is _very small_, not that it's very big.
4) Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player? Get a warrant -> own a phone is a very straightforward process that fits into existing models of civil liberties in the US.
If the absolute value of China + Russia + ME was the same, but US went down? Yeah, probably. Doubly so if sales going down meant less R&D investment and therefore lower quality software.
To be fair, an objective person might prefer to have _no_ "big players"
Whether a biased or self-interested commenter on the subject believes this is possible or not doesn't eliminate the possibilty of this preference
It is like asking whether a voter would prefer to have the "biggest players" giving funds to X candidate or Y candidate, ignoring whether the voter would actually prefer campaign finance reform instead
I dont really trust the intent of any information I read online. This article could well be part of a influence campaign by a foreign power.
"Because if you talk about something the most, this means you have it the most.." is how most people perceive things. Of course, the opposite is often true.
People talk about US as if it’s some kind of lala land! Every country, every person should take active measures to protect itself from US influence.
The headline can't be taken at face value. "Largest" is based on the number of investing entities (including individuals), not something more objective like dollars invested. Also, the US is not making these decisions as the headline implies.
esalman•4mo ago
My home country does not have formal diplomatic ties with them, yet we purchased and deployed surveillance tech from this country.
We live in a truly dystopian nightmare.