The Us Is Now the Largest Investor in Commercial Spyware

One might be tempted towards the conclusion that dystopian surveillance doesn't materially impact crime rates and that if we want to solve the latter, we need a different solution than the former.

Mostly because $FAV_TECH_COMPANY constantly tells me they love privacy. They fight backdoors in court, they rush out security patches and closely coordinate with the government to ensure I'm safe. Every advertisement seems to reinforce the idea that they cared about my security, I guess I put too much faith in the principles of private enterprise.

Whether there's any overlap between them and enemies of the people will heavily depend on the latter's ability to steer towards good governance. The track record for the past few decades hasn't been great.

To be fair, an objective person might prefer to have _no_ "big players"

Whether a biased or self-interested commenter on the subject believes this is possible or not doesn't eliminate the possibilty of this preference

It is like asking whether a voter would prefer to have the "biggest players" giving funds to X candidate or Y candidate, ignoring whether the voter would actually prefer campaign finance reform instead

People talk about US as if it’s some kind of lala land! Every country, every person should take active measures to protect itself from US influence.

I dont really trust the intent of any information I read online. This article could well be part of a influence campaign by a foreign power.

"Because if you talk about something the most, this means you have it the most.." is how most people perceive things. Of course, the opposite is often true.

If the absolute value of China + Russia + ME was the same, but US went down? Yeah, probably. Doubly so if sales going down meant less R&D investment and therefore lower quality software.