What is Reddit's opinion of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It’ll be what they always are, sanctions. It’s what Obama did (if you can even call it that with China), it’s what Trump did, and it’ll be what Biden does. Behind the scenes, they’ll continue to gather intelligence, put NSA, CIA, DIA on these groups, executive order, and if he’s really following the game plan some new agency with a billion dollar budget who just finds out these compromised organizations aren’t following best practices and reminds them NIST exists.

If you’re interested, the book @War , is a great source.

(First time I've hit a word limit haha)
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Yeah cool - sooooo I think the key difference with these things is the compartmentalisation is nigh impossible.

In a lot of the instances you've listed (I'm familiar with roughly half/two-thirds of them) we're dealing with a single geo-political entity.

Mostly America, usually ones involving many people are more military-based, ones with smaller numbers of people involved are political based.

While it may seem like there's a lot of people involved, there's genuine single-mindedness to the geopolitical ambition, right? (i.e. advance America's interest).

Also I think Snowden is a great example of how easy it is to blow it open at scale. He made those leaks in 2013, the actual infrastructure of spying on citizens was signed off by George Bush in 2001. It was framed to him by the NSA post 9/11. But keep in mind there were signs of this coming out as soon as 2003. NYT was actually told not to publish an article about it by the government in 2004 but released it in 2005. That's 8 years before Snowden.

Keep in mind I'm personally coming from this from a technical background and geopolitics/history background - less an analysis of geopolitical ambitions/speculation on future. Looking back, not looking forward.

Got this bad boy on sale: \@war by Shane Harris. Goes over the history of cyber warfare. Really interesting how it's all developed. But I work on more user experience/front end development/human behaviour for website usage sort of stuff so I'm interested in the malicious aspects and I need to keep somewhat up to date on security to prevent malicious shit from fucking up my organisation.

That book goes more in to US and China's efforts (I think they cover Russia?) But the thing is... None of this is conspiracy.

The activities of these national agencies are well recorded. I mean, buildings are surveilled, profiles of the users going in having been recorded as computer science/algo experts/statisticians/encryption experts etc. Some malicious activity occasionally gets recorded coming from there when they slip up, but it's mostly a noticeable black hole of activity.

Nations are in a cold cyber warfare of probing each others systems and assessing vulnerabilities and trying to find zero-day hacks so that in the event of open warfare they can massively disable communications and infrastructure. This isn't conspiracy. It's also genuinely the new MAD, it's far harder to defend against attacks than it is to hack systems. In the event of war we're all fucked.

So back to the sort of thing around those one's you've talked about - the conspiracy with Snowden wasn't the US cyber warfare capabilities or that these departments existed or the technology capabilities, or hell - even them spying on their own citizens - the conspiracy astonishment was that they were using it on their own citizens at *such a scale* under a guise of "terrorists are everywhere!". The program was literally called "Total Information Awareness".

It was a modern version of McCarthyism that arose in the Cold War era ("Reds under the bed! Anyone could be a Communist!") America loves repeating their mistakes, but this was a new and novel way that was fucking nutso compared to what we've seen before.

Back to compartmentalism, you'd need to be somehow applying this to competing geopolitical interests.

Like Australia right - we have a left and a right. England? They have a left and a right. New Zealand, every member of Five Eyes has internal competing political interests, then over the top of that - the nations themselves have their own geopolitical ambitions layered on top of internal political ambitions.

It seems counter-intuitive as we're allies, but modern international relations theory suggests "every country is in it for themselves, and you have no choice but to assume so" (can't remember the source, just had mates studying international politics - I remember being like "Wtf, what about allies? That's so cooked and progress-preventing" until they showed me their coursework).

So in *all those instances* of conspiracies which have proven to be true - it's always been one nation's work. Or one entities work, right? Also usually from a military which has a crazy rigid structure.

The moment you go to your ally "hey mate, we're gonna do this pretty fucked up thing - don't tell anyone because we're mates" you're giving them an unbelievable amount of power over you. Right?

Whether it's them giving you a knowing nod across the table at the next trade deal meeting to be like "remember this secret I'm keeping for you?" or in situations like right now in the US where internal politics have provided a desire to move away from that nation - if we had dirt on the US, and we truly got sick of their shit - our pollies would be using it to hold over them to say "play nice Trump you dickhead or we're going to reveal (x)". Even when common goals align - there's almost always one party massively gaining favour out of the deal, and a bit more of an onerous burden that needs to be carried by the other parties (e.g. "yeah fuck dude. We hate Saddam... Like fucking hell I guess we'll go to war with you... But you owe me!")

So then what has this got to do with Russia? Well they're far more politically isolated (no one's expecting we hack Kazakhstan and uncover a trove of shared Russian information) so it might seem that we could easily pin shit on them right?

But the thing is too many countries - even if allied - stand to LOSE so much by cooperating at such an egregious level.

If it is a lie or a conspiracy (e.g. "It's America hacking it's allies to black flag and pin shit on Russia") - all technical indicators and government/military indicators aside (i.e. the tracing and the actual structure of the FSB being public knowledge) it would give anyone too much power to delegitimise America if it's found out.

It would be the most low-yield, ridiculously high-risk military strategy. Probe your allied nations companies and crap for... Placing pressure on Russia? The pressure is already there, it's unnecessary to generate fake outrage. Russia and China do enough of that on their own - there's no need to do soft power campaigns against nations that couldn't find soft power if it was nibbling at their nutsacks.

What you gain in the short term would be like ruining a century of economic build up and international relations overnight if it came out.

This is very different to a proxy war, and very different to other scandals which simply ruin a political party's ambitions.

There is also too much to gain through uncovering the truth - hence why Russia and China say "this is western propaganda!" yet they consistently fail to provide evidence of how it's a lie (an excuse for this is they don't want to acknowledge military points of fragility by announcing the methods of an attack they've suffered - but this would be such a huge win for them that they would be insane to prioritise a system they can replace for global disrespect of you enemy which sets them back decades in trade and international relations - potentially breaking up your enemy's alliances).

Read a book... specifically this one, he's responsible for doubling it. https://www.amazon.com/War-Rise-Military-Internet-Complex/dp/0544570286