I should find this more mortifying, but with the EU Court of Justice's decision on the privacy shield, India's ban on Chinese apps, and the great firewall + other nationalized internets, the US just seems like a late mover on nationalizing the internet.
The Clean Network – United States Department of State
81–90 of 412 posts
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#82I support the unity of all nations. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#83The question I think this is an answer to is how you can have a reasonable expectation of freedom and privacy while sharing an internet with a CCP who has militarized their technology sector as a means to facilitate colonial expansion. I'm no fan of anyone involved, but we should accept that the Internet as we may have known it has been compromised by exogenous governance structures and their gatekeepers in service o…
Is it the devil we know though? Until the talks about TikTok started, I assumed nothing like this could ever happen in this country.
That's just how politics works in general, is it not? Big issues can underlie for ages and a single mass media event may trigger a big change.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#84This is disgusting. Anybody working at an American firm that's supporting this initiative should be ashamed. Anybody working on this project is actively contributing to the destruction of international trust and cooperation. I am beyond disgusted at my government. This Republican administration has been an unprecedented disaster on every front.
How would you suggest we limit the surveillance and active attacks on American infrastructure by the Chinese government? They show no signs of letting up and/or respecting how America works in the slightest.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#85This is disgusting. Anybody working at an American firm that's supporting this initiative should be ashamed. Anybody working on this project is actively contributing to the destruction of international trust and cooperation. I am beyond disgusted at my government. This Republican administration has been an unprecedented disaster on every front.
WTF? Did you read beyond five words? Did you just see Trump and go full stupid as so many do?
This applies to US Government facilities that use 5G must adhere to the rules put forth, that makes sense. You want your own government to do its best to protect its assets from providers who cannot be trusted.
This is not a US only stance. This is the world reacting to a PRC effort to rewrite the ideals of the internet to their own. No one in the Western world trust China much anymore because not only for their own bullying at home but their overt threats to Hong Kong and Taiwan. You can damn well bet they will increase those if they perceive the US administration to be weak or insular which there is a good chance the US will turn inward soon just opening the door
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a bunch of different measures discussed, but they all seem to remove some attack surface that we have seen exploited. Securing the routers and network cables removes the means for man in the middle attacks (or at least makes them preventable with router security). Not connecting to telecos does the same (because of bgp highjacking and the like). Removing chinese apps and not storing data on Chinese servers ma…
What i don't get is why we should care about this (care as in, advocate for) . MITM is a great argument for distrusting the everyone in the middle, not trying to increase trust in the middle man - no? This just feels like an attempt to control who is the middleman spying on data, not actually securing Americans data. Which makes sense, coming from the government and whatnot - but i'm just trying to make sense of if t…
Look at the "great cannon" attack for an example of why securing the middle is important. Secure software obviously shouldn't trust the middle, but the middle being compromised means that insecure software can do orders of magnitude more damage.
Moreover the middle can just shut down. Especially for things like embassies it's not a good idea to give the adversaries an easy off switch.
I agree that "encrypt all the things" would be a very nice addition.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#87We now have our own "Great Firewall"
> We now have our own "Great Firewall" I don’t see anything about content filtering. Just transport integrity. The closest we come to that is the prohibition on apps, but that’s still an ocean away from censoring text messages mentioning the Tiananmen massacre.
It's fairly simple. Did the app you download have anti-American sentiment posted on it? Banned. It could have been Chinese propaganda after all. Same goes for video hosting, web hosting, etc.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd add that the collection of telecom companies at the bottom of the page is grossly misleading. It makes them appear as signatories or as if they're following America's lead.
Probably true. At the same time, they may have no choice. This sort of thing is not elective. There are a lot of people around me taking that as a list of companies not to do business with. As if this will save them from the global surveillance dragnet. But here's the thing, you either submit to american surveillance and tracking, or you submit to some other nation's surveillance and tracking. You will not be able to…
The point I was referring to is that is that companies are listed that have announced Ericcson as their network infrastructure hardware supplier for years, and the decision has nothing to do with Pompeo's "Clean Path".
However, they are listed as if they are following the directive rather than having been long in front of it. It's gross political posturing, useful or not.
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This doesn't fix all security problems, but it removes some of China's current advantages in cyberwarfare. How? It makes attacks slightly more expensive (because you need to use infrastructure in a "clean" country), but it doesn't stop anyone that's dedicated and has money to spend. Want your spy-app on the app store? Don't register your company in China, just do it in the US. Voila, you're "clean."
Building something like tiktok covertly is orders of magnitude harder than building it openly in China.
Why? Copy cats are normal, everybody copies things that are successful in other countries. How do you assure that the company that creates a new app "out of the blue" isn't secretly funded by China? Require a background check and federal approval before an app can be downloaded more than 1000 times?
Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State
#90I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…
> Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly.
Unfortunately far from true. There's a small percentage who have the resource to run this kind of ops. Don't look at FAANG on how security is in companies, they're outliers by far.