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No. We don't trust each other. But if we all know we're all spying on each other we're a lot less likely to act up fearing that someone else will find out. It'
by Nadya 11y ago
No. We don't trust each other. But if we all know we're all spying on each other we're a lot less likely to act up fearing that someone else will find out.
It's not a super friendly close relationship like you might have with a sibling or your lifelong best friend. But it's "I know you're not doing anything bad. You know I'm not doing anything bad. So until one of us does something bad, we can 'trust' each other and continue business like usual."
- duaneb 11y agoThat's not trust, that's just continual observation.
- caskance 11y agoTrust means something different in every context. I don't trust my wife the same way I trust Digicert, but I "trust" both. This is what it means for nations to trust each other.
- duaneb 11y agoYou trust your understanding of the math underlying Digicert. I don't see how we trust germany at all if we are spying on them. It's one thing to collect signal intelligence within bounds, and it's quite another to continually exploit an ally's vulnerabilities to your own advantage. What about the trust we have for our government? I don't recall anyone justifying the NSA's existence with anything other than the threat of soviets (and then... terrorists, which has frustratingly increased dramatically domestically since the beginning of this practice.)
- caskance 11y agoI trust the math behind RSA in general, but I also trust Digicert specifically in the sense that DigiCert Global Root CA is in my Trusted Root Certification Authorities store whereas, say, Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions RootCA is not. The NSA has overreached their authority in many ways, but this isn't one of them. Not spying on Germany, especially their intelligence service, would be negligent.
- duaneb 11y agoHow would that be negligent? What's the nightmare scenario here, rise of the fourth Reich? Yay, we can get rich off another European war! Don't be ridiculous, spying has very little value except to the paranoid and Machiavellian
- caskance 11y agoI'm sure the nightmare scenario is beyond the imagining of decent people like you or I. But considering Germany has been the aggressor of the two largest conflicts of the previous century, do you honestly believe it's prudent to say "just let them do whatever. I'm sure they've learned their lesson this time"?