The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics.
One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia.
So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter.
All that said, I'm not a US citizen (although in a Five-Eyes country), so I do worry about using US-hosted services.
> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US.
That point would be a lot stronger if the US government hadn't demonstrated shocking callousness and disregard for international law in their efforts to catch notorious whistleblowers Snowden and Assange.
I remember when Belarus downed a plane to catch a political dissident and all western countries acted shocked, even though these countries had tried to do the exact same thing to Snowden on the US's behalf, with a presidential plane no less.
International law isn't really a thing if it has no teeth. I would be more worried about the US breaking its own laws. Which they of course do, on occasion. But there is a lot of pushback and not too much fear of reprisal if you call them out and fight them on it. For example, we are in the process of appointing a supreme court justice that, during her career, has fought against US Government overeach and represented alleged terrorists imprisoned (oh sorry, "detained"), in Guantanamo.
My point isn't "the US is bad because it doesn't respect international law".
My point is that the US is willing to go pretty damn far to put some high-profile dissidents in a hole and throw away the key, and there is very little pushback both internally and internationally, which kind of undercuts the whole "the US government would hesitate to do X because whistleblowers would stop them" argument.
Hold up. Downed a plane is different from grounded a plane. I don't know the Belarusian case, but either you misused the word or they are very different.
I live in the USA, therefore I need to consider it as part of my threat model mostly in the blunders / withholding exploits (thanks CIA ~.~) senses. For everything else I try to vote informed and support a combination of the EFF, ACLU, and other organizations that can be better informed experts on the law and it's applications.
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government?
The same could be said for businesses that have offices and physical assets in the US.
The argument is the US system is more accountable, fair, and able to be resisted. Not perfect by any means, but I see a lot of daylight between the two governments.
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in <insert power country>, without being at least partially beholden to the <insert powerful country> government?
The problem with this kind of Mad Libs argument is that it falsely implies the substitutions are equivalent when they're not. Also your quote shears away the context of the original statement that made it meaningful.
There definitely seems to be at least a little truth to that argument, though. Over the years Kaspersky has found and documented a whole bunch of seemingly US government linked malware whilst their Western competitors just haven't, and I think there's at least some evidence this is intentional on the part of those other companies.
> There definitely seems to be at least a little truth to that argument, though.
Of course there is, but as this thread is trying to point out, that "little truth" is completely insufficient when assessing risk. The degree to which a particular government can interfere with companies headquartered there matters. The legal culture in those countries matter. The ability to contest and redress this interference matters. An estimate of the worst that can happen to an individual who resists this interference matters.
I'm a US citizen living in the US, so I'm certainly biased, but I do believe my data (and my person, and if I ran a company, my company too) is much safer being in the US than in Russia.
It's certain that all major world powers engage in various forms of cyber warfare. It's completely expected that countries (and companies within them) that are allied will (most of the time) not expose other allies for cyber attacks and malware distribution. It's also completely expected that antagonistic countries (and their companies) will do so.
Back to the point of this article: of course Kaspersky is a US national security threat, precisely because it (as a Russian entity) will try to expose the US government's cyber warfare capabilities. Whether or not Kaspersky is a threat to the cybersecurity of individuals in the West isn't the issue here. (I would expect they probably are, to some extent, though!)
We already do know, however, that the US has no shame "asking" US run companies for their customer's data without due process, and that this has been going on for every large US tech company. So I don't see the logic.
You talk about assessing risk, but we know from the Snowden leaks that the risk in this matter in the US approaches 100% as the size of your company increase. What degree of risk is higher than 100%?
It may be, or his company is really that good above others (I don't think he personally was involved in any of this, but hired good enough people to do so). I tend towards former but have no proof either way.
I still have a serious and (since Russia-started a war in Ukraine) permanent problem with him - as pointed elsewhere [1] he went through KGB school - voluntarily, he was actually active KGB intelligence just like Putin. At those places, your objective morals go down the drain very fast and for good. And obviously both are still very close, he approves overall totalitarian direction of Russia and often spoke against 'too much freedom' in the west and on internet.
Please explain how they are not equivalent. Just because two governments are on good terms or are in some kind of partnership does not guarantee that one or the other will not take actions that benefit only them. What am I missing here?
Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law.
Nobody is perfect at any of these. But if the FSB wants a code change in Kaspersky, they're getting that code change. There is no independent press to report it. No opposition incentivized to call them out on it. No court in which they could lose.
> Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law.
Exactly. Mad-libs "arguments" typically boil down to an invitation to ignore salient differences (which the structure cannot call attention to), make a superficial comparison, and finally arrive at a false equivalency.
While the methods may differ, is this not true of any governments intelligence agencies? Whether or not there is press/courts/rule of law. For press to report on an event they have to be aware of it, for courts to intervene they also have to be aware of it, for rule of law to matter then no part of a government can operate outside of it in any manner, so no extrajudicial actions either.
The point of press/courts/rule of law is that at least you have a chance. Without those, no chance. That matters.
The US is not some monolithic entity. It's almost weirdly schizophrenic. Yes, the government will e.g. use some super-shaky legal arguments to justify torture ahem "enhanced interrogation", but on the other hand Freedom of Information Act requests still get processed. Yes, the NSA will spy on US citizens, but even they feel the need to come up with some legalistic / procedural cover.
Even as the US's checks and balances are tested, and structural inequalities are examined, there is a broad and deep tradition of fighting the government and not going to jail like Navalny.
The traditions and norms of a country's populace, and its institutions really really matter, especially when their institutions are being tested.
Corruption is everywhere, but this is too simplistic a pattern-match.
EDIT> Knight-Ridder did some fantastic and courageous investigative journalism debunking the US casus belli in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion. It didn't stop the invasion, but they were recognized later. Can we imagine that happening in Russia?
> Knight-Ridder did some fantastic and courageous investigative journalism debunking the US casus belli in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion. It didn't stop the invasion, but they were recognized later. Can we imagine that happening in Russia?
This type of thing is something I wish people would recognize more. In Russia right now, the simple act of participating in a peaceful protest against the war in Ukraine could easily land you in jail. While the US government has at times had a sketchy anti-protest track record, can we really imagine the US federal government attempting to pass a law today that makes it a jail-able offense to speak out against a US military action? (Hint: the answer is, unequivocally, no.)
> This type of thing is something I wish people would recognize more. In Russia right now, the simple act of participating in a peaceful protest against the war in Ukraine could easily land you in jail.
It's even worse than that: merely calling a war a war can land you in jail:
> Russia insists that it is not at “war” in Ukraine, instead referring to its violent campaign as a “special military operation.” Under a harsh new law, Russians now face up to 15 years in prison if they spread “fake” reports and call the conflict what it is: a “war” and “invasion.”
> The point of press/courts/rule of law is that at least you have a chance. Without those, no chance. That matters.
I agree with you.
> Knight-Ridder did some fantastic and courageous investigative journalism debunking the US casus belli in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion. It didn't stop the invasion, but they were recognized later. Can we imagine that happening in Russia?
Dude it's 98% because the feds only take slam dunk cases to trial, and they're extremely professional. Seriously, read up on bad convictions, it's nearly always state or local judicial systems. Frequently it is federal prosecutors that break open the corruption.
All governments are corrupt, but is it remotely plausible they are equally corrupt? Are they not comparable?
I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that, due to my citizenship and physical residence location, the NSA is probably more of a threat to my personal freedom than the FSB, but also acknowledge that, all things being equal, the FSB is a shadier organization than the NSA, with fewer legal restrictions on its behavior.
There are no relevant legal restrictions on the NSA behaviour. We know that the NSA breaks the law without any consequences. This idea that Western intelligence is any less corrupt and morally bankrupt, and indeed any less willing to interfere with people outside their borders as anyone else is frankly entirely ridiculous.
Who has more practical power to force code into a security product that runs in a privileged context, without anyone finding out? I think it’s not the NSA.
Why do you believe that, the NSA had access to Cisco PIX systems for years and it was only disclosed once those systems started to be replaced with ASA and other newer hardware.
I dont believe the NSA, CIA or even the FBI really have any actual legal limits.
> The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric.
Any metric you and I would like to use, yes. The govt of Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of ours, murders journalists with a chainsaw on a foreign soil and smuggles the body out of the host country in suitcases - yet no Saudi company is penalized. Supporting a proxy war in Yemen is not that different from Russian invasion, but somehow it suffers no consequences for doing so.
It's actually easy to justify: for the vast majority of Saudis prince MBS is a good ruler. Who are we to judge how their government works, given completely different cultural backgrounds, religions, and different expectations resulting from that difference? We'd be happier if Saudi Arabia was a democracy with a rule of law instead of chainsaw, but if the majority of Saudis prefer the latter, we shouldn't try to force them to change, even if homosexuals can be legally stoned to death there.
It's an easy argument, but it undermines the "objectively" part of your statement. If we accept MBS, we should accept Putin. If we don't accept the way SA works, as we don't accept Russia's, then we should not trade with the Saudis. We do trade with them, though - we (Poland) even increased (2x or more) the amount of oil imported from them this year, and they continue being our friends and valuable allies in the region.
The situation is frankly schizophrenic. Either there are objective metrics, in which case they should be applied everywhere equally, or we allow Saudis do what they want, but then we have no grounds on which to condemn Putin.
If we want to still stay close to Saudi Arabia and condemn Putin, we have to agree that we condemn Putin based on something else than objective standards of governing.
I'd really like for our foreign policies to stay true to the ideals we hold dear, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Putin is an actual, real threat, so we don't accept him and his buddies, while MBS only dismembers his own citizens (and he even allowed women to drive!), so we accept him. That's also a kind of "objective metric", but it's far from what you meant, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable TBH.
In fairness, when you say "no Saudi company"...there ARE no companies in Saudi Arabia which we could sanction. Not really. There's the oil business, which basically is the same thing as the regime itself. Saudi Arabia doesn't do anything else. Doesn't produce anything else.
> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia.
> So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter.
I'm honestly trying to figure out here if you are trolling, or if you genuinely believe that.
If you do genuinely believe that the US government is worse (or at least just as bad) as the Russian government when it comes to citizens' personal liberties, I'd be very curious to understand why you believe that to be the case.
Certainly I (as a US citizen living in the US) am biased, but I do believe I have a healthy level of criticism and skepticism of my own government, and yet I cannot see how we even come close to how bad the Russian government is.
I, as non-US citizen, thus having sub-human rights in eyes of every US 3-letter agency, still prefer very much US approach to, well, practically any matter compared to Russian one.
For Russians, they really don't like anybody else. All that slavic closeness is crap as we can see in Ukraine and elsewhere. Heck, they don't care about other Russians neither, just a cannon fodder and poor fuckers to exploit and then throw away like garbage. They may very well like to see the entire world burn in nuclear hell if they don't get what they want, that's why current situation is really one of those moments in history when future is decided.
It would sure as hell help US image in entire world to actually backtrack a bit all those spying initiatives towards friendly, democratic and in all-important-US-aligned countries. Showing some respect with deeds and not just empty words and so on. I don't know how much that was/is visible from inside, but Trump made huge amount of damage to that, although to be fair he was just a continuation of overall trend.
It would help US to condemn Colin Powell for brandishing supposed proof of WMD at the UN Counsel in 2003, which they never found after invasion.
It would help for the US to stop Predator attacks. Most of the world is convinced that they are illegal and illegitimate.
And as a French person, I preferred Trump, because he didn’t trigger any new war and he calmed down Little Rocket Man. He even shook his hand! And donated 100% of his salary to charities! Biden is back and the war is back: Bad negociation tactics, Hunter Biden shenanigans with billions transferred as a chairman of an oil company in Ukraine, female ministers of defense in all of Europe, focus on having transgender soldiers, so Putin believed we were weak and the field was open. The result is a war.
We could have avoided this war.
PS: I’m not saying female ministers of war are incompetent, I’m saying they make no-one afraid. It was way more frightening when Krouchtchev’s general responsible for the nuclear button was a crazy alcoholic: When you’re faced with an madlad, you take him seriously.
That's... a strange opinion from French person (although looking at current French government's actual involvement in Ukraine it kind of corresponds).
Why - Trump was extremely close to removing US from Nato in 2018, a moment Putin waited for decade and a half (how he knew about this is another story, let's say my opinion is really not favorable for Trump and tend to lean on US secret services conclusions on their cooperation). Only conservative hawks in his own government managed to steer him away from this tragic moment.
For any European not in bed with russian spying conglomerate that's an existential threat. We can see it now. Ukraine wouldn't have any significant arms deliveries and would be left to die and be enslaved again by Russia, with Trump cheering this as brilliant move (what he still actually did).
Russians would take over Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary (although there is already pro-kremel person installed so not much work needed), possibly also Romania, Moldova, Czech Republic. Also that pesky Georgia, who do they think they are having their own state and democracy. Simply good old pre-1989 setup with good old soviet terror. That's maybe why you guys don't care so much about Ukraine, it seems too far and not your fight, car manufacturing in Russia seems more important. Considering what Putin actually says about whole Europe, you may be wrong this time.
Trump didn't "trigger any new war"? You might want to review who got impeached (and was guilty) for intentionally weakening Ukraine and propping up Russian interests.
Regarding freedom of speech, _relative_ freedom of association and the ability to do business and to criticize governments, the US is miles ahead of Russia.
That's funny as the thread is about contrasting Russia with US, but I don't seen to recall US invading any neighboring countries under the false pretense of defending some minorities.
But, seriously, if you remove "neighboring" from your statement (which seems to be not particularly relevant to a discussion of morality and respecting the sovereignty of other nations), I'm sure we can find plenty of bad examples perpetrated by the US, many of them much more recent than the Mexican-American War.
I remember a woman testifying that they were killing babies in Kuwait, and she was later discovered as being the daughter of an ambassador. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
I remember the late Colin Powell brandishing proof of WMD in Iraq at the UN Counsel. He will never land in the TPI, neither will the UN Counsel for basing a judgment upon unverified allegation causing dozens of thousands of illegal killings by the US army.
> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters.
I think the key misconception behind this argument is the idea that harmful governments is a binary flag, such that if you're subjected to one adding more makes no difference. In fact, different governments have different concerns. This means if you're subject to the US and Russia you're significantly more constrained than if you were just subject to one. As such, it makes sense to reduce exposure even if you obviously can't eliminate it.
(I also believe the US govt is much better than Russian, but I'm leaving that out because I my argument doesn't need it and I'm uninterested in that argument)
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets > in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? > They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics.
To be fair, the US government has used gangster tactics to get US companies to install backdoors and allow encryption breakers.
One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia.
So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter.
All that said, I'm not a US citizen (although in a Five-Eyes country), so I do worry about using US-hosted services.