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.
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.
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.
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.
I was thinking about this (almost this, adjacent) lately, and I’m actually still undecided.
If I could choose who swoops up all my data, would I prefer it to be my own country, an “ally”, or an adversary? State or commercial entity?
What if I were to criticize my own government? Run for office? Participate somehow in an NGO? Start my political podcast / talk show? In all those cases, the worst people to spy on you are the ones who can also knock on your door at 4 AM, put you in prison and make up bogus charges.
I mean it’s all hypothetical, I can’t choose who spies on me, and I am okay only observing the world and navigating it as well as I can.
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.
RianAtheer•3h ago
OutOfHere•2h ago
SilverElfin•2h ago
OutOfHere•2h ago
ImJamal•1h ago
SilverElfin•1h ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/world/europe/china-outpos...
hirvi74•1h ago
I am not certain that is necessarily true. At least, not if one is originally from China.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
lmz•1h ago
pessimizer•43m ago
corimaith•11m ago
The answer is don't place yourself in the crosshairs of great powers in the first place, which then puts into the degree you can align yourself with their interests.
pessimizer•36m ago
Or from another direction, China has 4x the population of the US, and still has fewer people in prison.
corimaith•9m ago
hirvi74•4m ago
2. There are 'alternative' ways of dealing with suspects and criminals other than prison sentences. And on that note, if China has a lower per capita prison population than the US, then it makes China having the highest rate of capital punishments even worse.
soperj•2h ago
autoexec•1h ago
Honestly, I imagine that other nations should be very concerned about the small number of US based companies creating all the CPUs which could easily be backdoored. Same for the blackbox wireless chipsets our phones depend on too.
That and so many of the companies that people depend on are in the US (Google, Amazon, social media, Apple, MS, etc) since you have to think that the US government is collecting massive amounts of data from those places.
saagarjha•5m ago
linkregister•2h ago