7 ms·

Plenty of legit potential concerns.. Russian govt could "nationalize" Kaspersky at any moment and push rogue updates.

cf141q5325 5y ago
Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia)
- jcranberry 5y ago
  Maybe, if the US government thought they could get some useful information from you.
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  As a US citizen you still have some semblance of rights under the constitution that dictate what the government can do.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    Snowden's leaks showed that the NSA was simply ignoring the 4th Amendment, and that the secret FISA court was letting the NSA do so. Theoretically, the Constitution protects you. In reality, the intelligence community acts largely in secret, and there's very little preventing them from violating the Bill of Rights. Citizens don't even know what rights they've given up until someone like Snowden spills the beans.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      No. You need to understand what you are comparing to. The question is comparing US and Russia. No. It’s not the same. But you turned this question into comparing US to perfection. Yes, you are right. US is not perfection. But there is a big difference between 70 to 10, even both are not 100. What Snowden revealed does not make 70 to 10. If you think that way, you don’t understand how bad an authoritarian regime is.
      - rat9988 5y ago
        I put both russia and us at 10. Why would I rate it any better, given its past?
        jiscariot 5y ago
        In the US the press can be openly antagonistic toward the government without reprisal beyond maybe having a WH press-core pass tossed. This provides a path for whistleblowers. Could the Russian press behave toward Putin as the US press toward Trump? If so, then you can have your 10s.
        rat9988 5y ago
        Snowden and assange have been used as example. Although, there are probably more people shut by the Russian government than by the us, by far. The thing is, the US secret services are secretive enough that non one can complain about, independently of the ability of the people to complain.
        juanani 5y ago
      - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
        Putting a numeric value on this is silly. The fact is that the United States government can compel companies to aid in its surveillance (just recall when they forced Snowden's email provider to install a backdoor). Even if a company does not want to participate or is not compelled to do so, the US government has very significant capacity to break into and co-opt systems (all the way from targeted surveillance of individuals by intercepting and bugging hardware to tapping undersea cables to indiscriminately hoover up communications). So when people say that Kaspersky might be forced to go along with Russian intelligence, the same goes for American tech companies and US intelligence. There is indeed a 4th Amendment that is supposed to protect Americans, but the last two decades have shown that the government is perfectly willing to ignore that legal restriction. The US has the most extensive global surveillance system in the world. US intelligence services receive about as much funding as the entire Russian military. I have no doubt that Russia tries very hard to engage in extensive foreign surveillance, but its not in the same league as the US.
    - lern_too_spel 5y ago
      No, Snowden's leaks show DoD lawyers working hard to justify programs under the 4th Amendment. In the fallout of the leaks, all but phone metadata collection passed muster.
      - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
        The dragnet surveillance programs that Snowden revealed are obviously outlawed by the 4th Amendment. Of course lawyers working for these agencies will try to justify them. That's what they're paid to do. During the Bush Jr. years, lawyers for the administration also argued that torture was legal, despite the fact that it's blatantly illegal. Nevertheless, these programs are incredibly difficult to challenge in court, because the secrecy surrounding them makes even proving standing nearly impossible.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        lern_too_spel 5y ago
        There was only one extant US dragnet surveillance program in Snowden's leaks, which was the phone metadata collection, so I don't know why you have the plural. Snowden's leaks showed the lawyers' justification for that program (https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/2009%20OIG%20Report%20on%20Bulk%20Collection.pdf https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/2009%20OIG%20...) which said that the data does not fall under Fourth Amendment protection by Supreme Court precedent, and it was never ruled unconstitutional, only exceeding the law that the government claimed had authorized it.
        DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
        Snowden's leaks revealed several mass surveillance, including PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora. As for the (un)constitutionality of mass collection of Americans' call records, here's what Reuters[0] says: > In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional. The court did not make any ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program, but they wrote in their decision that it very likely was Unconstitutional.[1] Historically speaking, this NSA program is exactly the type of search that the 4th Amendment was intended to prevent. Americans were upset about "writs of assistance" that gave colonial officials wide powers to conduct searches against classes of people. That's why the 4th Amendment requires warrants to be specific and limited in scope. Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional, and is exactly the sort of thing the 4th Amendment was intended to put a stop to. 0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T3CK https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T... 1. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/13-50572.pdf https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/1...
  - berdario 5y ago
    That's nice for some people, but is cf141q5325 even a US citizen? I'm not, so from that point of view US companies cannot offer many guarantees to me
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Depends on the country. Unlike Russia, the government in the USA is not all powerful.
  - confiq 5y ago
    except when it comes to force companies out of the USA because of "security reasons". I think Russia is using similar tactics, does it?
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      Try saying the words "Ukraine War" in Russia. That alone is grounds for getting arrested, possibly disappeared and/or tortured. You have to say "Ukrainian Special Security Operation".
      - mardifoufs 5y ago
        This is from the first article I came across on the RT front page right now: >Moscow attacked neighboring Ukraine last month, following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state. >Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military alliance. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force. It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        dragontamer 5y ago
        RT is the propaganda arm of the Russian government operating in other countries. Internal newspapers, such as Novaya Gazeta, have been shut down for saying "war" in print. Just the latest in many papers, radio channels and more that have been silenced in Russia. > It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine. They didn't use the word "war".
- nopcode 5y ago
  I've worked in multiple European environments (gov & private sector) that mandated usage of European anti-virus & firewalls. In finance I had a client that didn't trust any vendor and asked me to reverse engineer VPN appliances (they negotiate a special clause with the vendor), which makes more sense then trusting based on country of origin.
- dahdum 5y ago
  > Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia) You should have the same concerns about software from anywhere, including the US. I believe it's a couple orders of magnitude more likely I'd be harmed by Russian government malicious code than any other nation. Russia is in crisis, striking indiscriminately, and has no reputation left to lose. So that's where my concern lies.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    > Russia is in crisis, striking indiscriminately, and has no reputation left to lose. So that's where my concern lies. With wikileaks, we've seen, that americans did all of the same things, you now try to accuse russia of potentialy doing. I'm not saying russians won't do it, but americans already did it.
    - trasz 5y ago
      They have - in the past. The threat from Russia is now.
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        So you're saying that they suddenly stopped for no reason at all?
- devwastaken 5y ago
  Russia can do it without any backlash from their citizens. U.S. can't do it to their own citizens without backlash. Differences in representation of population means different incentives.
  - rat9988 5y ago
    The only backlash I saw is the backlash to snowden from its own country.
    - monetus 5y ago
      That is just silly, and has to be said in bad faith. Are you serious?
      - rat9988 5y ago
        I do.
      - PoignardAzur 5y ago
        Where's the bad faith? The US and its allies pulled down the plane of the fucking president of Bolivia to catch Snowden. Those are not the actions of the state worried about public perception, except in a "silence the dissidents" sense.
      - 8note 5y ago
        He's still living in Russia in fear for going back to the US
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Backlash after the wikileaks? What backlash? FISA courts? Gag orders? Just call the "other guys" terrorists, nazis, whatever, and americans can occupy and bomb whatever country they want (and they did that to many countries) withot any backlash. Gone are the days of the hippies and anti-war-anything... sadly. I was kinda hoping for a "revolution" in one of the european countries (eg france) during covid, where people would "remove" the current government, and make the other governments atleast worry a bit when their people get mad... but sadly, not even that.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  It's about probability. I mean I have my issues with US foreign policy but at the end of the day they are more friendly and reliable than Russia. Yeah if the US ever goes rogue we're all doomed but then your antivirus software will be the least of your worries.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dralley 5y ago
  Sure. But we're talking about a government that just stole hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign planes (and other equipment) and took down satellite radio networks with cyberattacks (causing a lot of collateral damage), recently backdoor'd thousands of companies via Solarwinds, and looked the other way w/r/t ransomware groups until one of them caused a major international incident (Colonial pipeline). The threat from other nations is a lot more theoretical than it is for Russia.
- xeromal 5y ago
  This kind of comment isn't my favorite, but I do understand where you're coming from. I personally think that it's better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I'm American. My country is the US. Yes, they're spying on me. Yes, they do naughty things. But I assume that at the end of the day, the US has my interests at heart more than China does. Or the UK, or Russia, or Turkey, or anyone else. I happen to live on the land that they'll protect even while filling their pockets. My feedback to you would be to do the same. You don't have to trust your own government but assume your government will keep you around longer than any other government will.
  - 8note 5y ago
    The us government has been known to want to keep people alive for the purposes of chattel slavery. I'd much prefer misdeeds that don't affect me from a government that doesn't care about me, than those of a local government who wants to keep me alive for the purposes of doing more bad things to me in the future
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  The FTC isn't telling non-Americans what to do, only Americans. Russian software, outside the jurisdiction of the American legal system and under the control of Putin, is a threat to American infrastructure. American software is not.
- account42 5y ago
  You should absolutely have concerns with proprietary software from the US but unless you are in a country that is currently in a cold-war relationship with the US the concern is likely VERY different.
rangerelf 5y ago
They don't need to nationalize anything, they can just threaten his family with imminent and painful retribution and he'll open it up to anything they want. Period. All these people whining about "they're both the same", they are not. "Bay of Pigs" argument does not apply, last time I checked Cuba was still standing where on the other hand Ukraine is burning and getting demolished. It seems that those complaining really really do not understand the horror of living under an "official" or "unofficial" (i.e. government sanctioned vs. government tolerated) mafia rule: either you do what they tell you, or you cease to be, along with your spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc. There is absolutely no negotiation.
raffraffraff 5y ago
Or rouge updates?

Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia)

jcranberry 5y ago
Maybe, if the US government thought they could get some useful information from you.
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
As a US citizen you still have some semblance of rights under the constitution that dictate what the government can do.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  Snowden's leaks showed that the NSA was simply ignoring the 4th Amendment, and that the secret FISA court was letting the NSA do so. Theoretically, the Constitution protects you. In reality, the intelligence community acts largely in secret, and there's very little preventing them from violating the Bill of Rights. Citizens don't even know what rights they've given up until someone like Snowden spills the beans.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    No. You need to understand what you are comparing to. The question is comparing US and Russia. No. It’s not the same. But you turned this question into comparing US to perfection. Yes, you are right. US is not perfection. But there is a big difference between 70 to 10, even both are not 100. What Snowden revealed does not make 70 to 10. If you think that way, you don’t understand how bad an authoritarian regime is.
    - rat9988 5y ago
      I put both russia and us at 10. Why would I rate it any better, given its past?
      - jiscariot 5y ago
        In the US the press can be openly antagonistic toward the government without reprisal beyond maybe having a WH press-core pass tossed. This provides a path for whistleblowers. Could the Russian press behave toward Putin as the US press toward Trump? If so, then you can have your 10s.
        rat9988 5y ago
        Snowden and assange have been used as example. Although, there are probably more people shut by the Russian government than by the us, by far. The thing is, the US secret services are secretive enough that non one can complain about, independently of the ability of the people to complain.
        juanani 5y ago
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      Putting a numeric value on this is silly. The fact is that the United States government can compel companies to aid in its surveillance (just recall when they forced Snowden's email provider to install a backdoor). Even if a company does not want to participate or is not compelled to do so, the US government has very significant capacity to break into and co-opt systems (all the way from targeted surveillance of individuals by intercepting and bugging hardware to tapping undersea cables to indiscriminately hoover up communications). So when people say that Kaspersky might be forced to go along with Russian intelligence, the same goes for American tech companies and US intelligence. There is indeed a 4th Amendment that is supposed to protect Americans, but the last two decades have shown that the government is perfectly willing to ignore that legal restriction. The US has the most extensive global surveillance system in the world. US intelligence services receive about as much funding as the entire Russian military. I have no doubt that Russia tries very hard to engage in extensive foreign surveillance, but its not in the same league as the US.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    No, Snowden's leaks show DoD lawyers working hard to justify programs under the 4th Amendment. In the fallout of the leaks, all but phone metadata collection passed muster.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      The dragnet surveillance programs that Snowden revealed are obviously outlawed by the 4th Amendment. Of course lawyers working for these agencies will try to justify them. That's what they're paid to do. During the Bush Jr. years, lawyers for the administration also argued that torture was legal, despite the fact that it's blatantly illegal. Nevertheless, these programs are incredibly difficult to challenge in court, because the secrecy surrounding them makes even proving standing nearly impossible.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - lern_too_spel 5y ago
        There was only one extant US dragnet surveillance program in Snowden's leaks, which was the phone metadata collection, so I don't know why you have the plural. Snowden's leaks showed the lawyers' justification for that program (https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/2009%20OIG%20Report%20on%20Bulk%20Collection.pdf https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/2009%20OIG%20...) which said that the data does not fall under Fourth Amendment protection by Supreme Court precedent, and it was never ruled unconstitutional, only exceeding the law that the government claimed had authorized it.
        DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
        Snowden's leaks revealed several mass surveillance, including PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora. As for the (un)constitutionality of mass collection of Americans' call records, here's what Reuters[0] says: > In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional. The court did not make any ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program, but they wrote in their decision that it very likely was Unconstitutional.[1] Historically speaking, this NSA program is exactly the type of search that the 4th Amendment was intended to prevent. Americans were upset about "writs of assistance" that gave colonial officials wide powers to conduct searches against classes of people. That's why the 4th Amendment requires warrants to be specific and limited in scope. Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional, and is exactly the sort of thing the 4th Amendment was intended to put a stop to. 0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T3CK https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T... 1. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/13-50572.pdf https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/1...
- berdario 5y ago
  That's nice for some people, but is cf141q5325 even a US citizen? I'm not, so from that point of view US companies cannot offer many guarantees to me
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
MattGaiser 5y ago
Depends on the country. Unlike Russia, the government in the USA is not all powerful.
- confiq 5y ago
  except when it comes to force companies out of the USA because of "security reasons". I think Russia is using similar tactics, does it?
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Try saying the words "Ukraine War" in Russia. That alone is grounds for getting arrested, possibly disappeared and/or tortured. You have to say "Ukrainian Special Security Operation".
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      This is from the first article I came across on the RT front page right now: >Moscow attacked neighboring Ukraine last month, following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state. >Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military alliance. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force. It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        RT is the propaganda arm of the Russian government operating in other countries. Internal newspapers, such as Novaya Gazeta, have been shut down for saying "war" in print. Just the latest in many papers, radio channels and more that have been silenced in Russia. > It doesn't seem like they are afraid of getting disappeared for saying russia attacked ukraine. They didn't use the word "war".
nopcode 5y ago
I've worked in multiple European environments (gov & private sector) that mandated usage of European anti-virus & firewalls. In finance I had a client that didn't trust any vendor and asked me to reverse engineer VPN appliances (they negotiate a special clause with the vendor), which makes more sense then trusting based on country of origin.
dahdum 5y ago
> Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia) You should have the same concerns about software from anywhere, including the US. I believe it's a couple orders of magnitude more likely I'd be harmed by Russian government malicious code than any other nation. Russia is in crisis, striking indiscriminately, and has no reputation left to lose. So that's where my concern lies.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > Russia is in crisis, striking indiscriminately, and has no reputation left to lose. So that's where my concern lies. With wikileaks, we've seen, that americans did all of the same things, you now try to accuse russia of potentialy doing. I'm not saying russians won't do it, but americans already did it.
  - trasz 5y ago
    They have - in the past. The threat from Russia is now.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      So you're saying that they suddenly stopped for no reason at all?
devwastaken 5y ago
Russia can do it without any backlash from their citizens. U.S. can't do it to their own citizens without backlash. Differences in representation of population means different incentives.
- rat9988 5y ago
  The only backlash I saw is the backlash to snowden from its own country.
  - monetus 5y ago
    That is just silly, and has to be said in bad faith. Are you serious?
    - rat9988 5y ago
      I do.
    - PoignardAzur 5y ago
      Where's the bad faith? The US and its allies pulled down the plane of the fucking president of Bolivia to catch Snowden. Those are not the actions of the state worried about public perception, except in a "silence the dissidents" sense.
    - 8note 5y ago
      He's still living in Russia in fear for going back to the US
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Backlash after the wikileaks? What backlash? FISA courts? Gag orders? Just call the "other guys" terrorists, nazis, whatever, and americans can occupy and bomb whatever country they want (and they did that to many countries) withot any backlash. Gone are the days of the hippies and anti-war-anything... sadly. I was kinda hoping for a "revolution" in one of the european countries (eg france) during covid, where people would "remove" the current government, and make the other governments atleast worry a bit when their people get mad... but sadly, not even that.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
It's about probability. I mean I have my issues with US foreign policy but at the end of the day they are more friendly and reliable than Russia. Yeah if the US ever goes rogue we're all doomed but then your antivirus software will be the least of your worries.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dralley 5y ago
Sure. But we're talking about a government that just stole hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign planes (and other equipment) and took down satellite radio networks with cyberattacks (causing a lot of collateral damage), recently backdoor'd thousands of companies via Solarwinds, and looked the other way w/r/t ransomware groups until one of them caused a major international incident (Colonial pipeline). The threat from other nations is a lot more theoretical than it is for Russia.
xeromal 5y ago
This kind of comment isn't my favorite, but I do understand where you're coming from. I personally think that it's better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I'm American. My country is the US. Yes, they're spying on me. Yes, they do naughty things. But I assume that at the end of the day, the US has my interests at heart more than China does. Or the UK, or Russia, or Turkey, or anyone else. I happen to live on the land that they'll protect even while filling their pockets. My feedback to you would be to do the same. You don't have to trust your own government but assume your government will keep you around longer than any other government will.
- 8note 5y ago
  The us government has been known to want to keep people alive for the purposes of chattel slavery. I'd much prefer misdeeds that don't affect me from a government that doesn't care about me, than those of a local government who wants to keep me alive for the purposes of doing more bad things to me in the future
lern_too_spel 5y ago
The FTC isn't telling non-Americans what to do, only Americans. Russian software, outside the jurisdiction of the American legal system and under the control of Putin, is a threat to American infrastructure. American software is not.
account42 5y ago
You should absolutely have concerns with proprietary software from the US but unless you are in a country that is currently in a cold-war relationship with the US the concern is likely VERY different.

rangerelf 5y ago

They don't need to nationalize anything, they can just threaten his family with imminent and painful retribution and he'll open it up to anything they want. Period. All these people whining about "they're both the same", they are not. "Bay of Pigs" argument does not apply, last time I checked Cuba was still standing where on the other hand Ukraine is burning and getting demolished. It seems that those complaining really really do not understand the horror of living under an "official" or "unofficial" (i.e. government sanctioned vs. government tolerated) mafia rule: either you do what they tell you, or you cease to be, along with your spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc. There is absolutely no negotiation.

raffraffraff 5y ago

Or rouge updates?