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Comment by hyperdunc | Hacker News Reader

The honeymoon is over. The Internet is now a hostile environment. We cannot assume good conduct from any party of reasonable size and should assume deception from anything that isn't fully open source and vocal about it. It sucks to assume the worst...

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That has always been the case. It's always been the case that if your adversary is a well funded government you need very careful security.

We knew this from Echelon in the 1980s.

I was thinking the same thing. Honeymoon's over? What honeymoon? There never was a honeymoon!

Objectively, perhaps not. (I suppose I remember the early days of the Internet when it wasn't that popular.) My gist is that our implicit trust in the system/infrastructure we rely on is undermined by this sort of revelation. And yet, as a whole, we de facto continue to trust in opaque entities that provide valuable yet likely compromised services because it is convenient.

This should not be a revelation though. Granted, back when the Internet wasn't so popular, the risk for people like you and me, or for small companies, was relatively low. Partly because the value of Internet-accessible information was relatively low, too -- twenty years ago, if I bought a backdoored home router, all the Evil Guys would get access to would be really bad code snippets and a few folders of porn pics.

But the fact that people with access to your infrastructure also had access to your data was more or less well known ever since "the beginning", and it's also why internetworks other than the Internet were a thing for a long time.

> And yet, as a whole, we de facto continue to trust in opaque entities that provide valuable yet likely compromised services because it is convenient.

Don't forget the scarcity of alternatives though. It takes a lot of money to come up with a credible alternative to Juniper and Cisco. Siphoning personal data is what sells nowadays, not protecting it.

What implicit trust?

Phrases like If you want something to stay private, don't post it. are bandied about by the general public. Not just by single issue privacy advocates, but by people of all sorts.

The US government has had essentially unfettered access to landline communications since 1928[1]. See also: [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead_v._United_States 2. http://scarinciattorney.com/olmstead-v-united-states-and-the...

Now? The code was introduced in 2008.

It would appear that the "party of reasonable size" here is China or Russia, not a corporation.

I'm not sure that matters. Any powerful entity wrapped in secrecy is suspect, whether they're a nation state or a corporation. We, the users, are always the victims - dependant on the infrastructure or services that have been compromised.

I don't really get why you specifically mention these two countries. It could be because your government is at war with them but that would be speculation.

The problem goes much deeper. It could be any "larger" corporation or government or other entity having enough manpower. It could even be parts of a corporation or government entity.

However which way you put it, a program of which you don't have access to the source cannot be trusted.

Can you please explain how you reached that conclusion? What made you exclude US and UK?

Parent is probably taking the CNN article at face value.

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