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Chinese freelance hackers… The good ones always become white hats and work in the security industry. Then there are script kiddies stealing WoW accounts who sometimes got caught. There probably aren’t many highly skilled black hats.

Politically motivated hacking in China generally means nationalistic display of power against foreign authorities or hackers, which seems to happen less now than a decade ago. Or maybe I am simply not keeping up with the news.

Western media might have greatly exaggerated the competency of Chinese government hackers.

Of course, I said primarily. There are criminals too, it’s an entire country.

Individual hackers employed by the Chinese government aren’t all geniuses, but they’re organized. They share information. They aren’t motivated by quick returns, they’re pushing persistent access for extended information gathering. They don’t make the distinction between gathering for signals intelligence and commercial advantage that we do. That’s why they’re a threat.

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Hmmm. And just what form would such proof take?

Does it matter? He wants you to prove a negative somehow. Don’t think about these things, he doesn’t.

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If US intelligence was working behind the scenes stealing IP to provide US businesses an advantage, it seems fairly likely that Snowden would have leaked that. Of course that isn’t a positive indication, but it’s the best we’re going to get.

Prove you’re not Dawn Falcon.

The humanity…

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That’s not part of their mandate. Overreach in SIGINT is one thing-- SIGINT is their mandate, and they were overzealous with an end justifies the means type scenario. IP theft is another thing entirely. There’s no indication they would do that, and my personal feeling (for what it’s worth) is that they would be offended by the notion. These guys see themselves as patriots protecting their nation, and using those tools for commercial interests would be beneath them. But it’s all speculation as we don’t know either way.

And I bet that Merkel is really an agent for Putin. And I have exactly as much evidence as you.

In this country it would be almost impossible for, say, Apple or MS to be getting regular illegal help from the (who do you think? NSA? CIA?) for any amount of time without some employee showing up on 60 Minutes or some other news outlet with the story. with all the info Assange and Snowden have leaked out, there has been zero evidence of the government doing spying and giving the info to private US corporations. One of two reasons for that: either the government made THAT information more important and more protected than, say, info on killing civilians in Afghanistan, or spying on allies leaders, or it doesn’t happen. That’s just not something that could happen and stay hidden for very long.

Of course, if you want to believe something even though there has been no evidence at all, you’re gonna believe it.

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Have you ever worked at an executive level at a U.S. company? I have. For several. Believe me, the information would go further than “a couple of execs” in the real world for “secret” information to be useful/used. This isn’t a Ludlam spy novel. That’s not how the real world works. Most CEO’s aren’t knowledgeable enough to be able to use such info, they rely on their CTO (that’s been my job) and their CFO and their group presidents to take information and translate it into actionable info, and then a strategic plan has to be put into place to take advantage of it. Big (and small) U.S. companies just aren’t that effective and streamlined, in fact, you can look at a big U.S. company, be it G.E. or Microsoft or whoever, very very much like a big bureaucratic government agency. The politics, the fights for position, the rivalries, etc. Someone is gonna find out, someone is gonna leak. It may take some time, but the bigger the “secret” the more likely it is to be leaked to the press.

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Did I miss Snowdon (Snowden) revealing that the NSA was providing secrets they obtained from spying on foreign companies to US companies? What Snowden has revealed is that the NSA has been accessing the records of U.S. companies, which is why foreign companies are shying away from doing business with U.S. companies. Oh - and we’ve already heard from insiders at some of these companies that such records have been accessed by the government (again, hard to keep secrets in companies.)

Snowden has revealed pretty much all he knows. That includes extremely sensitive stuff like the NSA spying on foreign leaders, like Germany’s leader. The fact that he has not revealed any spying on foreign companies and that information being fed back to U.S. companies is a very compelling data point. If that was happening, he would have been very quick to reveal it.

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This line of reasoning is moving into wackjob-conspiracy-theory territory very quickly. Snowden had deep access and US intelligence cooperating to leak secrets to industry would have been a very major thing to expose. I’m just not going to buy that it was happening but somehow kept so totally secret that Snowden didn’t know about it. Not when the authorities in charge of keeping such things secrets proved unable to keep him from all the other damaging stuff he leaked.

Yeah, he knew and revealed things that were EXTREMELY sensitive and secret: Prism, Five Eyes, Boundless Informant, XKeyscore, Fascia, Tempora, MUSCULAR, Optic Nerve, spying on foreign leaders, intercepting cell calls from many nations, LOVEINT, and many many many more programs. But the ONE THING that either he chose not to reveal or was held more secret than every other secret program was the government stealing foreign companies’ secrets and feeding them to U.S. companies. THAT was over the line compared to everything else.

You know what? He also didn’t reveal the government intelligence program to overthrow Samsung and thus help Apple win their lawsuits. But we KNOW that happened, so logically he just didn’t have that in all his stolen data.

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