I laughed, but also ... yes? As a lover of liberty I would much rather just my own government (by which I am ostensibly represented) have the ability to infringe on that liberty than 2 governments. I would want to support regulations that protect myself and neighbors from the influence of those other infringers, no?
Your own government also has more tools to use against you. You'll pass through your own border more frequently, you're more available to be arrested, harassed by LE, etc.
How about as a lover of liberty, _nobody_ snoops on our data?
Of course you are correct, but the tools available to other governments still concern me greatly. Are we actually presently capable of making sure nobody snoops on our data? If so then I agree it is a better solution. But is it not better to use an imperfect plan which is implementable than wait for a perfect plan (if such a thing exists for cyber-security) to become implementable when a threat is present?
Depends how paranoid you want to be, and to what degree of certainty (after all it's impossible to prove a negative).
But in general, backdoors for "the good guys" are just more surface area for "the bad guys", and developers of products which take security seriously lock themselves out too.
The actions required to shut out that second attacker are blunt tools that impinge upon your personal freedom far beyond their stated purpose. And since you still have that primary attacker, then you still have to defend against them anyway.
The proper solutions to protect us from "China" are the same as the solutions to protect us from NSA - E2E encryption, P2P communication, decentralized namespaces, and making data transmission (ie trust) as non-interactive as possible.
Can we realistically implement these in the near future? Will this not function as a stop-gap in the meantime while we do work on your (better) solution?
Yes they can be implemented, when there is necessity. The tech industry has been coasting on commercial surveillance to fund centralized solutions, relying on consumers not looking too hard behind the curtain. I'd say that overall fiction is what is really collapsing here.
I don't see how it's possible to answer whether this will "function". None of the simplistic actions stated in the press release address any of the actual threats - hence everyone is filling in their own imagined technical specifics. This is basically another "series of tubes" moment, with politicians not understanding that while they can control the physical wires, they cannot control the emergent complexity of communications happening over the wires.
Is it really another "series of tubes moment"? Is it not true that a system crucial to the majority of economic, social, and political(!) activity in this country ought not to be running on hardware/software known to be designed/manufactured by what has proven to be a "malign actor"?
For sure, but this page is also trying to position the US government as a trustworthy provider of equipment for other governments. Given some of the historical work done by the US secret services [1] it's laughable that another government would take this seriously.
