Comment by iotku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iotku | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>If it was that easy they wouldn't be trying to push backdoors in companies, going as far as leveraging Five Eyes nations to legislate backdoors and carry out surveillance on their behalf,

Just because this would be easier for them to have official backdoors doesn't mean they can't ever do anything given enough interest and funding behind it.

>eventually blaming "Russia" for every attack based on trivial IP geolocation

There's plenty of political reasons to state that (even if they were to know otherwise) and if they actually do have more accurate information on a different entity it could avoid showing their hand if they just attribute it incorrectly.

>The reality is that the FBI can't beat maths and has no leverage over services from foreign companies. i.e, a Russian VPN on a clean VM is probably enough to skirt the whole of the FBI.

Probably can't beat math, but if the FBI is running the supposed "Russian VPN" that gives them lots of information. You only have to make one mistake and you could potentially out yourself. (Assuming you don't have further layers to fall back on)

>US digital intelligence is, for all intents and purposes, a paper tiger in 2021. The whole thing is a farce to give the appearance of sophistication to act as a deterrent.

Are you willing to bet your life that this is the case?

> Just because this would be easier for them to have official backdoors doesn't mean they can't ever do anything given enough interest and funding behind it.

Considering there are random "mom and pop" scam agencies across South Asia and the Caribbean stealing billions of dollars from Americans annually while posing as the FBI and IRS and nothing whatsoever happens to them I'd wager that it's quite unlikely the FBI has the ability to do much of anything regardless of interest and funding.

> There's plenty of political reasons to state that (even if they were to know otherwise) and if they actually do have more accurate information on a different entity it could avoid showing their hand if they just attribute it incorrectly.

This is suggesting there is a 4D chess move at play, which is a straying a bit too far for me. The only other possibility here is if [Russia, China, NK, Iran] know the US is not able or willing to enforce a deterrence and they don't even bother hiding.

> but if the FBI is running the supposed "Russian VPN" that gives them lots of information

That's extremely unlikely to the point where if there was a complex covert operation like this they wouldn't burn exposing it on outing an independent malicious actor.

> Are you willing to bet your life that this is the case?

There are entire groups that have literally bet their lives on this and are still very much alive. If the US government was as sophisticated as you're suggesting, I don't think they'd still be driving patrols around the levantine desert trying to find ISIS members or have a giant fentanyl issue plaguing the country.

I really can't make sense of the idea that the US has all this power at their disposal but completely refuses to use it against actual organised groups targeting the US and Americans, but will somehow put all their cards on the table when Johnny from Idaho exploits a mail server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com