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Comment by DoctorOetker | Hacker News Reader

What prevents a consortium of network operators using similar hostage politics on Iran?

What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?

(currently unaffected network operators have an incentive to chip in, lest political factions local to or neighboring their cables start imitating Iran)

(unlike conventional warfare, cyberattacks can be highly directed to regime players, elites, etc. so targeting a network operator seems like the dumbest move one could make: conventional warfare can sometimes generate new supporters for the regime, hitting the elites or regime elements much less so)

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> What prevents them from pooling together the funds for 2 decades of relentless cyberattacks on Iran, unless twice the same fee is payed in reverse to compensate for just the threat?

I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1]. In addition to economic warfare, other types of espionage, and acts of terrorism - e.g. blowing up a bunch of people's mobile devices and pagers (in before someone accuse the children and civilians harmed in the attack of being terrorists themselves).

Bad actors have been extracting all kinds of concessions and actions out of Iran for many decades now under all kinds of threats, tactics, and attacks.

This war was literally started by the U.S. and Israel blowing up peace talks in Iran.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_and_Iran

> I thought it was clear to everyone that this is _exactly_ what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran for literally 20+ years [0] [1].

You changed my proposition to a different one by equating

US & Israeli cyber warfare, with

US & Israeli & worldwide telecom sector cyber warfare.

I ask why risk that step? worldwide telecom sector is highly networked (by profession obviously) and is probably already picking up phones and coordinating a common response, together they stand, divided they fall, none of them look forward to potential normalization of nation states charging fees unilaterally.

Its an error to confuse big problems with even bigger ones than they already face.

Telecom sector might collectively demand public payment of twice the threatened fee (however small the actual demanded fee is) plus a public statement by Iran that they publically repeal the threat just to make clear this type of precedent won't be tolerated.

Or they would just pay because telecom companies do not have armies.

this makes no sense, you're saying that if some cable operator in some distant nation agrees to chip in to prevent such normalization worldwide, that Iran will come over to that nation to physically overpower the cable operator who doesn't have an army?

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