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I've seen wikileaks, and I know what US did and can assume that they did a lot more and worse after that... and the NSA catalog was a fun thing to read too.
And on the other hand, we have speculations ("not too far fetched") about russians doing bad stuff on a massively-used search engine, in english, about malware that will be detected, dissected and analyzed in a matter of minutes by pretty much every government agency of every nato country...
I'll take my chances. And also, i'm pretty sure UK wouldnt extradite a russian journalist if they posted about yandex doing bad stuff.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/world/china-targeti...
https://apnews.com/article/china-thailand-dissident-bomb-thr...
Seriously. This is extremely well documented behavior of various regimes all over the world and you will not be able to produce even one example of America doing it.
The reason that the US and RU/CCP aren’t treated the same is because they do not behave the same.
Fun variants to play:
- Show me one instance of my country performing extrajudicial killings by drone that take out an entire unaligned wedding party (Russian? American? Afghan wedding party probably doesn’t see the difference)
- Show me instance where “my country”’s law enforcement kills random people in their bed because they were in the wrong house
- Frequently chokes people to death because, uh, definitely their skin color, religion, sexual orientation? (Plenty of candidates here)
- At least my country doesn’t force down planes in contravention of international law because there’s someone on board we don’t like (Belarus? Any takers for more?)
- Randomly grabs people off the street and tortures them in black sites around eastern europe. (This is a fun one, so many competitors)
- Or “definitely doesn’t punish family” as long as you don’t count separating children from their parents in internment camps and losing them (Fun family game of “Things that happen along which border for 20$ ? Ukraine or Mexico?”).
I get it, I get it, it’s less bad than outright torture killing, so one can still feel morally superior to the Nazis or Russians. Unless one remembers the picture from the extraordinary rendition blacksites.
Seriously. It’s extremely well documented behavior of “regimes” all over the world, but …
One can absolutely be proud of their country for whatever reason of their choosing, not much wrong with that, but when you’re forced to narrowly cherry-pick definitions to arrive at “phew, still less bad”, you’re pretty deep down the rationalizing game already and may want to ask yourself what your redline is. Because the Reich set a pretty damn high bar in the last century when it comes to comparative rationalization.
The point here isn’t to make you feel bad about your country, you can do very little about these things, whether you are an individual Russian or American - I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons that play these inane games of “if you position the lens exactly this way, how dare you imply my country is as bad as yours”.
> I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons
If you think the world has “slipped” to some local minima exemplified by modern US behavior, you haven’t been paying attention to history at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
It’s actually pretty remarkable that we even think about a single individual dying by accident these days. Great argument for how carefully the US conducts warfare.
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
So, US was at war with yemen? Pakistan? Iran? When?
Leaders of militaries are targeted all the time during conflict.
Detaining does not happen in US but they just get shot by LEO.
A lot of black community will tell you they are improperly taken/shot in for trivial infractions.
Tell me one instance in RU whereLEO just shoot unarmed civilian for minor road traffic stop.
David Miranda was detained at Heathrow:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Miranda_(politician)
While I understand US is better than RU,CN they are not that far ahead.
Nit pick is OK but defending CIA is hopeless. Ask amnesty they will tell you more cases.
“My country is less bad than your country” is a fun game, but at some point it does require a very large amount of cognitive dissonance to stay ahead of the game. Especially when the country is standing with one foot in a perpetual white supremacist coup
Hard to compare without reading russian news, and even then, I feel it would be more normalized there.
That's news to me.
USA dropped drone bombs on people in pakistan and iran, countries they're not even at war with.
In EU’s case, the reason you should view US spying differently from RU/CCP spying is that US spying just saved your continent from being rolled by Russia, while RU spying/influence is what rendered EU leadership blind to the largest military operation since WW2 on their doorstep.
And yes, russia definitely attacked EU and google+nsa spying on my phone definitely stopped them, sure.
Maybe nato shouldn't build so many bases and put so much american weapons all around russia (and china). The world would be a much nicer and peaceful place if US kept their army at home.... just the list of attacked countries is huge.
The CIA has black sites specifically for people like that
Nah we're not playing your game of restricting this to family members for political speech.
Your original point was to address
> Amen. I've never understood why people fear speculated Chinese and Russian spying, while they never seem to recall the US spying that is well documented and confirmed.
https://ccrjustice.org/files/ghost-detention.pdf
> In some cases, family members – including young children – of “ghost detainees” have been detained themselves, and held in CIA secret sites, including 9 and 7 year old boys.
The question is why US spying is treated differently than Chinese and Russian. The answer is that China and Russia behave dramatically differently than the US does. I never made any claim as to the US being some flawless benevolent entity, but I made a clear argument (that you've not refuted) as to why most of the global community views them differently.
yes. they are open about what they do whereas we do it covertly
> why most of the global community views them differently.
citation needed
"most of the global community"
you mean the west, which is not even a majority of the global community.
but even if it was a majority, again, because we do it covertly, we hide it and everyone only sees the good things until someone like snowden comes along and leaks our dirty laundry.
Realistically anyone could be placing malware anywhere and the right defenses are an up-to-date browser and some level of common sense. But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
Renditions are one thing, that's bordering on conspiracy peddling, but using computers from people all over the world to do your bidding in a botnet? That's been a thing for many years now. I remember this already being a huge issue 15 years ago, with people taking cracks of popular software, adding a piece of malware to the crack, uploading the malware-laced package to torrent trackers and manipulating UL/DL stats to make people believe their package was the authentic one.
If I were in an army and tasked to deal with cyberwar efforts, the first thing I'd do was to set up a botnet and let it run in stealth mode, so that I'd have the resources for massive strikes ready at a moment's notice. Basically the cheater way to win in Plague Inc - achieve worldwide distribution, hide away and then ramp up all of a sudden to overwhelm the opponent.
Your comment sounds like it’s a website or some hacker who decides if you’re secure and not your browser. Which is obviously wrong and smells of fringe security ideas.