Originally Posted by
GUWonder
No, they are not. Have you paid attention to how international electronic communications are routed and where the bottlenecks tend to be? Those bottlenecks are where communications are most easily monitored and the Chinese government is, relative to the US and UK, in a pretty lousy position to get local cooperation or willful "ignorance" where the bulk of those bottlenecks are.
That's your assumption. I have no idea where the Chinese route communications. I wouldn't speculate one way or the other. But it's a moot point in relation to Chinese cyber attacks. Those can be launched from many different locations.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
It doesn't matter for whom government is looking. After looking enough, most everyone can be prosecuted for something or be placed into a position to be threatened to do the government's bidding in such a way as to get prosecuted for it.
On this we agree.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
I did, and the suggestion about vendor oversight by a company doesn't change much of anything. If it did, did you think that the US would be backing Softbank and making sure some Chinese companies weren't suppliers to US comm. service providers in the DC area even when the vendor would be "American" or an American-favored-foreign-government-partner's company?
It absolutely changes things. If it's overseen by, and sold by, a company (ex: Apple) in another country (ex: US), then it's subject to said country's (US) laws. The same is not said for a product owned by/manf by a foreign country (China in this case).
We don't like iPhone chargers killing people.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Non-Chinese vendors, like Chinese vendors, have an interest in not being known as willfully putting in backdoors for government spying. Whether or not they can act on those interests, well that depends. Fortunately there are some whistleblowers from time to time and place to place that then get some of those vendors to sort of reveal that they have cooperated with the government's warrantless surveillance of massive numbers of people in and beyond the US.
That sounds nice and logical, but in actuality it's not the case. I would assume that every government surveils its peeps to some degree. Some are simply more capable than others.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
They play by questionable rules much as the US Government does; the PRC however does it without the global surveillance infrastructure and related connections in place that Team US-UK have managed to exploit.
Again, I'm not willing to make that blind assumption. Most American's probably would have said that about the US Gov't pre-Snowden.
PS: Do you really believe it's only the US-UK? Intelligence agencies around the globe routinely coordinate efforts when it's mutually beneficial.
Apparently the French are learning about their own PRISM system that was targeted at the French.
http://www.thelocal.fr/20130819/spyi...out-of-control