FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

> What this really underscores is that what the PRC is doing through these proxy actors is really reckless and unbounded, in a way that is significantly outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space,"

What norms are he referring to?

Yea, I wasn’t aware that there was a rule book for spies. I thought the only rule was “anything goes, but don’t get caught.” But perhaps I’m uninformed.

Given that the US intelligence community, with PRISM and Upstream and the like, hoovers up all the world's communications, I think the "norms" must be "nobody except the US was able to do this until now." Now China has shown that it can compete in the same space.

He's referring to the norm that only the American government is allowed to conduct unlawful mass surveillance of American citizens. Who do these Chinese think they are???

The ones that are in his head, just as soft, curvy, and flexible as the matter inside

Western intelligence plus Israel*

And yeah pretty much. I don’t know anything about anything but it feels like there is a hierarchy (norm? At least what they are trying to enforce) of US > Five Eyes > other Western Intel (France, etc) > Pakistan/Russia/Etc > China/North Korea/Iran; and Israel falls somewhere in that mix as a maverick. Of course in practice it doesn’t work out this way.

Reminds me of the recent news that the US will ban Chinese components from undersea cables, globally: https://asia.nikkei.com/content/99550c9ade243fe057e8a2ba6f29...

Israel is a part of western intelligence. Adding them as your main response is strange.

Notably, Israel is not actually located anywhere near the physical ‘west’.

Neither is Australia but you’d almost universally call it the west. Because western in this instance is a cultural qualifier not a geographic one.

Objecting to calling Israel the west is at least as weird as including it in the context of this conversation.

Indiscriminate targeting. It's clarified at the end of that paragraph, and was part of the article's lead-in:

   "There's a thought among the public that if you don't work in a sensitive area that the PRC might be interested in for its traditional espionage activities, then you are safe, they will not target you," [deputy assistant director for the FBI's cyber division] said, during a Thursday interview with The Register. "As we have seen from Salt Typhoon, this is no longer an assumption that anyone can afford to make."

How are you defining West here? If we go by the international date line they're not all that far away and if you zag left as you go further south it works quite well. You need a similar shape on the other side too to get Europe but exclude Africa, so it makes for a pretty reasonable cut of the planet overall.

It's a tilted west.

It has very different values than the west.

Imagine if there were movements in Switzerland to move to certain areas to push out the speakers of some local dialect, and literally organized home-buying in groups to get them out?

By what measure?

Oof people hate this comment.

Look, I know it's cultural much more than geographical. But Australia can easily be both. It's not actually a counterexample.

Not the poster, but the Mossad has made quite a name for themselves. I honestly have no idea if Australia even has an intelligence service - do you?

That's an oxymoron : it's not targeting at this point.

(Some high value people do seem to be targeted for even more intensive spying.)

Australia is one of the 5 eye nations…

That’s NSA equivalent. But the point still stands - do you know the names of the agencies off the top of your head? I had to look them up on wikipedia, and they’re still pretty easy to forget about.

This is a thread about nsa style intelligence operations, where 5 eyes is explicitly called out.

What are we even talking about anymore? This sub thread is a weird digression on if it’s normal to include Israel in the phrase “western intelligence”. The US collaborates more with 5 eyes nations (2 of which are is the South Pacific) and Israel, be it Mossad or Unit 8200 than it does with France.

My contention is that the phrase Western Intelligence is a cultural signifier that has nothing to do with geography. And that pointing out that Israel is not in the west (while not doing the same for New Zealand) is more strange than including them by default.