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Comment by kqvamxurcagg | Hacker News Reader

It’s likely that whatever the Chinese or Russians are doing to the US, the US has bigger and better exploits gathering intelligence within adversary networks. Being too aggressive about these would undermine the US position when they are eventually discovered. The US must have some fantastic assets if they are putting up so little fuss about solarwinds and this attack.

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Pure unfounded speculation. The Russians and Chinese have a huge advantage over American intelligence agencies just by the simple fact that there are far more English-speaking Russians/Chinese than there are Russian-speaking Americans. Massive information asymmetry. How many native English speakers speak fluent Russian? Less than a few hundred in the entire world (I'm a Russian academic, I know). How many native Russian speakers speak fluent English? Hundreds of thousands of people. That's the reason why the Russian government is able to run massive projects that directly influence American public opinion through social media. America simply doesn't have that volume of talent and infiltration into foreign societies.

> The US must have some fantastic assets if they are putting up so little fuss about solarwinds and this attack.

Actually they are putting up so little fuss because they are incompetent and castrated since the last administration.

It's more about impunity. If your previous actions didn't cause any serious reaction, you will continue doing more bad things. Tolerance to bad things is destructive.

Just the number of native bilingual Russian-English speakers numbers in the thousands at least. Just think of everyone who immigrated to the US after the fall of the USSR.

>How many native English speakers speak fluent Russian? Less than a few hundred in the entire world

I think this is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read on HN, if not anywhere on the Internet. There are a few hundred native English speakers who are ethnically Russian/Ukrainian who speak fluent Russian in any one small neighborhood in a mid-sized city in the US, and there are dozens of such neighborhoods in the US, and the US is only 5% of the world's population. I personally know about 50 people who meet this description, I was at a Greek Orthodox christening with them last year! Not to mention that you can hire non-native English speakers who can read Russian, not to mention the new world of translation apps

I'm not talking about ethnic Russians/Ukrainians, I used "native English speakers" as a codeword to refer to "real" Americans, i.e. people who are have deep ethnic and historic loyalty to the American cause. You cannot rely on most ethnic Russians/Ukrainians in America to have blind loyalty to an American cause.

There's more than 100 Americans who have been trained in Russian in the Defense Language Institute. Looks like Russian is a 48 week course:

https://www.dliflc.edu/about/languages-at-dliflc/

The number who are actually fluent and culturally embedded is miniscule. I personally know some graduates of this program.

> the US has bigger and better exploits

No, I honestly don't think so.

+1 Insightful.

Hardware backdoors most probably.

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