I didn't suggest any such thing, nor am I excusing Russia's actions in the least bit. The original comment seemed to think that the US wasn't already involved

I didn't suggest any such thing, nor am I excusing Russia's actions in the least bit. The original comment seemed to think that the US wasn't already involved in this type of snooping and aggressive actions towards people's privacy, and that such actions would be a poison to tech - if anything, tech and government have happily crawled into bed with one another in the US, with only a few important cases where there has been resistance. So I responded to point out that the US has very little to learn from Russia - if the lesson is supposed to be trampling privacy and freedom via technology is going to hamper tech-businesses, then I really don't think the US learned it during any of the times it did exactly that. I don't think it learned it when the EU did it, and I don't think they're going to learn it from a VPN provider's servers being seized in Russia. The US heard the lesson long ago, and just didn't care. Putin having skeletons in his closet doesn't really change any of that.