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Comment by zer0faith | Hacker News Reader

Then why doesn't someone hold them accountable for this type of garbage.

Because the world outsourced the production of everything to China to save some bucks, and you cannot sanction them as a result. It's beyond electronics -- you cannot manufacture commodities varying from bras to certain chemicals without China.

US historians will not treat the people running the US from 1975-2005 well.

Accountability tends to come in terms of sanctions. But even sanctions are hard to maintain against the nation with the single highest count of human population; that's a market corporations positively salivate over tapping.

It also appears they're very difficult to hold, politically.

Their consumer market earn their wages in factories selling to foreign consumers using foreign IP.

How's that going for them?

Apple's a computing worldwide force thanks in part to Chinese manufacturing, so pretty well.

a major part of the problem that is often overlooked is the fact that US companies are often afraid to admit publicly that they've been the victim of state-sponsored IP theft fearing repercussions to their share price.

The IP theft issue is likely much bigger than we know publicly because ever decision a company makes focuses on the outcome to the bottom line. Admitting that the fundamental IP your billion-dollar company was built on has been stolen can't possibly do anything but harm to your reputation in the market.

Do you want them to be held more, or less accountable, than, say, the US government spying on a French aerospace firm? Or on an energy company, and selling their secrets to a state-friendly domestic firm? [1]

What kind of sanctions do you recommend against countries practicing industrial espionage against their allies? What about their enemies? Are you ready to apply them to all transgressors, or just ones that you consider enemies?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... - the cherry on top was that the victimized company here was later banned from doing business in the US.

Yeow, I guess the truth hurts. Yes, you seem to be correct, and I personally found it somewhat shocking (though perhaps not surprising) that the NSA did exactly what we're denouncing China for. I suppose you could argue that "there is only one documented case of the US doing it, but dozens or hundreds of cases of China doing it," which might be fair. Still, kinda not cool. Let Germany have their patent on wind turbine designs, or whatever.

In fact, that seems borderline incompetent espionage on the NSA's part. We submitted a patent that was basically identical to theirs, shortly before they did. Really? Hmm, I wonder how anyone could have figured out that something strange was going on?

The referenced article is also interesting: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...

Apparently Germany's intelligence services are forbidden to participate in industrial espionage, which includes defense against espionage. Therefore they were aware of the espionage but unable to inform the target company. They could only sit and watch.

How? Are you willing to fight a war with China?

> Then why doesn't someone hold them accountable for this type of garbage.

IIRC, IP theft issues are one of the grievances cited for the current US trade war with China.

People have tried, but what's your suggestion? Sanctions? War? What do you think the end result of either of those would be?

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