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If I infect someone's device with malware and exfiltrate data do gain money or obtain unfair advantages, I am a criminal. If a CIA employee infects a foreign f

If I infect someone's device with malware and exfiltrate data do gain money or obtain unfair advantages, I am a criminal. If a CIA employee infects a foreign finance minister's device with malware so US can obtain unfair advantages, he's an unsung hero.

greggsy 4y ago
But everyone does it - not just the US. If the CIA does something against another country it’s still illegal.. just not inside the US.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The claim that the US foreign policy agenda is promoting democratic values and human rights around the world, then, I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act? The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?
  - greggsy 4y ago
    your first paragraph is just a reflection of the way the world works. You can take sides - most people do - or not. Either way the ethics are steeped in a complex of nationalism, ideology, media, state control, and everything in between. Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.
    - boomchinolo78 4y ago
      Having met someone who was at the top of my country's intelligence machine: CIA is corrupt, other countries fare a bit better but not too well. It's a difficult problem to concentrate so much power and not have corruption.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    "Democratic values and human rights" is just how we refer to "how we want it done" - when what we want goes against them, they fall away to the side and aren't talked about.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    > Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray. I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about. > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.
  - jjitz 4y ago
    > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information Citation needed. What a ridiculous thing to say.
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      Well, the NSA and CIA and the State Department have long claimed that their cyber-espionage activities have nothing to do with securing economic information for the advantage of say, US oil companies, right? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cyber-espionage-group-is-actually-the-cia/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cybe... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?
      - MockObject 4y ago
        > Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'? Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      You want a citation for secret stuff the spook agencies do? Are you kidding me?
      - toomanyrichies 4y ago
        I'm not taking sides either way, but Hitchens's Razor does still apply here (i.e. "claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence").
        imwillofficial 4y ago
  - JackFr 4y ago
    > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    > I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act? Of course it was. Read Chomsky.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  "But everyone does it " <---- ?!?? out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak. At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !! How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.
  - runjake 4y ago
    Welcome to a peek behind the world’s thin veneer. You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed. Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.
    - mandmandam 4y ago
      > in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.
      - MockObject 4y ago
        Resource extraction using brutality is pointless without a market for the extracted resources.
Victerius 4y ago
States occupy a distinct place in the legal spectrum. If you kill someone deliberately, you're a murderer. If a government kills someone, it's either a capital punishment, an act of war, or an assassination. But the idea that national governments can commit "crimes" has always been tenuous at best, because there is exists no supranational entity with the willingness and the authority to enforce violence against rule-breaking states. The United States and international coalitions have acted as the surrogates of the rules-based order several times, like in Korea and Afghanistan, but a CIA employee acting on behalf of and on direct order from his government enjoys a certain immunity from prosecution, like states at large.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  States can't just "kill someone," they have to initiate criminal proceedings. You're describing a version of sovereignty that hasn't been recognized since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. In the modern world authority derives from the consent of the governed and is bound by law.
  - rolph 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Operations_(CIA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Operations_(CIA...
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      This would be a better link to make that point with [0] since the controversy section on that one only links to it, but my response would still be that government employees cannot overturn the rule of law by getting away with a few crimes any more than people who are not government employees can. Could you imagine if the police would give up on a law every time they had a cold case? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
  - bloak 4y ago
    Maybe some states have to initiate criminal proceedings before killing people, but other states are happy to kill people, including their own citizens, including children, without any criminal proceedings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... (To be fair, most countries have vague laws and corrupt courts so having a court in country X decide that someone should be executed is hardly any better, in practice, than having Barack Obama order the execution.)
tonmoy 4y ago
This applies to basically any other activity, from drug dealing to covert arms trading to assassinations. Malware is probably the least shocking imo
JackFr 4y ago
Do you really not see any difference? Given that HN readers are pretty bright, it's hard not to think you're making the argument in bad faith.
- trasz 4y ago
  Have you ever wondered if the difference you're allegedly seeing is not just a (very obvious when looked at from the outside) propaganda?
  - JackFr 4y ago
    Regardless of proaganda, the CIA is literally authorized by act of Congress, while I am prohibited by various acts of Congress. The CIA, the Congress, and the United States may be evil in your opinion, but there are facts which differentiate my actions from that of the CIA.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Sure - and it works the exact same way in, say, Russia, or China. The main difference between those and CIA is American propaganda.
      - JackFr 4y ago
        Yes. As in the USA, certain acts that individuals do in China and Russia are prohibited in their respective regimes and yet practiced by their foreign intelligence agencies. We agree fully. That is not the point you were originally making. You seemed, facetiously, to be confused that behavior prohibited to US citizens was permitted to the US intelligence apparatus.
vkou 4y ago
It's the difference between a soldier killing bad dudes at work, and me going out on the street to kill bad dudes on my way to work. State-state interactions are bound by different rules & norms than person-person or person-state interactions.
wiglaf1979 4y ago
It seems like this disconnect is something that riles you up. Context is key and the weaponization of cyberspace by Nation State actors is being defined as we go along. It's getting to be more than a bit dated but the book and documentary "Countdown to Zero Day" hits on this kind of stuff. I enjoyed the hell out of it mostly. The rest of the time was me getting more and more pissed about how short sighted we were with Stuxnet. Blowback and all that. Just a recomendation for your reading list since I was thinking a similar pithy comment and figure you might also enjoy that book like I did.
tomohawk 4y ago
And if the finance minister works for Putin, and it reveals that Putin is about to attack the Baltic states? Trying to take moral reasoning as it applies to individuals and apply it to states just doesn't work.

greggsy 4y ago

But everyone does it - not just the US. If the CIA does something against another country it’s still illegal.. just not inside the US.

photochemsyn 4y ago
Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The claim that the US foreign policy agenda is promoting democratic values and human rights around the world, then, I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act? The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?
- greggsy 4y ago
  your first paragraph is just a reflection of the way the world works. You can take sides - most people do - or not. Either way the ethics are steeped in a complex of nationalism, ideology, media, state control, and everything in between. Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.
  - boomchinolo78 4y ago
    Having met someone who was at the top of my country's intelligence machine: CIA is corrupt, other countries fare a bit better but not too well. It's a difficult problem to concentrate so much power and not have corruption.
- bombcar 4y ago
  "Democratic values and human rights" is just how we refer to "how we want it done" - when what we want goes against them, they fall away to the side and aren't talked about.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  > Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray. I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about. > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.
- jjitz 4y ago
  > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information Citation needed. What a ridiculous thing to say.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Well, the NSA and CIA and the State Department have long claimed that their cyber-espionage activities have nothing to do with securing economic information for the advantage of say, US oil companies, right? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cyber-espionage-group-is-actually-the-cia/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cybe... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?
    - MockObject 4y ago
      > Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'? Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    You want a citation for secret stuff the spook agencies do? Are you kidding me?
    - toomanyrichies 4y ago
      I'm not taking sides either way, but Hitchens's Razor does still apply here (i.e. "claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence").
      - imwillofficial 4y ago
- JackFr 4y ago
  > The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  > I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act? Of course it was. Read Chomsky.
mistrial9 4y ago
"But everyone does it " <---- ?!?? out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak. At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !! How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.
- runjake 4y ago
  Welcome to a peek behind the world’s thin veneer. You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed. Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    > in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.
    - MockObject 4y ago
      Resource extraction using brutality is pointless without a market for the extracted resources.

Victerius 4y ago

States occupy a distinct place in the legal spectrum. If you kill someone deliberately, you're a murderer. If a government kills someone, it's either a capital punishment, an act of war, or an assassination. But the idea that national governments can commit "crimes" has always been tenuous at best, because there is exists no supranational entity with the willingness and the authority to enforce violence against rule-breaking states. The United States and international coalitions have acted as the surrogates of the rules-based order several times, like in Korea and Afghanistan, but a CIA employee acting on behalf of and on direct order from his government enjoys a certain immunity from prosecution, like states at large.

whatshisface 4y ago
States can't just "kill someone," they have to initiate criminal proceedings. You're describing a version of sovereignty that hasn't been recognized since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. In the modern world authority derives from the consent of the governed and is bound by law.
- rolph 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Operations_(CIA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Operations_(CIA...
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    This would be a better link to make that point with [0] since the controversy section on that one only links to it, but my response would still be that government employees cannot overturn the rule of law by getting away with a few crimes any more than people who are not government employees can. Could you imagine if the police would give up on a law every time they had a cold case? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
- bloak 4y ago
  Maybe some states have to initiate criminal proceedings before killing people, but other states are happy to kill people, including their own citizens, including children, without any criminal proceedings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... (To be fair, most countries have vague laws and corrupt courts so having a court in country X decide that someone should be executed is hardly any better, in practice, than having Barack Obama order the execution.)

tonmoy 4y ago

This applies to basically any other activity, from drug dealing to covert arms trading to assassinations. Malware is probably the least shocking imo

JackFr 4y ago

Do you really not see any difference? Given that HN readers are pretty bright, it's hard not to think you're making the argument in bad faith.

trasz 4y ago
Have you ever wondered if the difference you're allegedly seeing is not just a (very obvious when looked at from the outside) propaganda?
- JackFr 4y ago
  Regardless of proaganda, the CIA is literally authorized by act of Congress, while I am prohibited by various acts of Congress. The CIA, the Congress, and the United States may be evil in your opinion, but there are facts which differentiate my actions from that of the CIA.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Sure - and it works the exact same way in, say, Russia, or China. The main difference between those and CIA is American propaganda.
    - JackFr 4y ago
      Yes. As in the USA, certain acts that individuals do in China and Russia are prohibited in their respective regimes and yet practiced by their foreign intelligence agencies. We agree fully. That is not the point you were originally making. You seemed, facetiously, to be confused that behavior prohibited to US citizens was permitted to the US intelligence apparatus.

vkou 4y ago

It's the difference between a soldier killing bad dudes at work, and me going out on the street to kill bad dudes on my way to work. State-state interactions are bound by different rules & norms than person-person or person-state interactions.

wiglaf1979 4y ago

It seems like this disconnect is something that riles you up. Context is key and the weaponization of cyberspace by Nation State actors is being defined as we go along. It's getting to be more than a bit dated but the book and documentary "Countdown to Zero Day" hits on this kind of stuff. I enjoyed the hell out of it mostly. The rest of the time was me getting more and more pissed about how short sighted we were with Stuxnet. Blowback and all that. Just a recomendation for your reading list since I was thinking a similar pithy comment and figure you might also enjoy that book like I did.

tomohawk 4y ago

And if the finance minister works for Putin, and it reveals that Putin is about to attack the Baltic states? Trying to take moral reasoning as it applies to individuals and apply it to states just doesn't work.