Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?

< Vulnerable members of society should be protected from scams.

There are three ways to deliver protection: build better walls, defeat attackers after successful initial attacks, defeat attackers before successful initial attacks.

The article ties itself into knots because it recognizes that the first way cannot deliver 100% security. But it refuses to recognize that there are two additional ways.

The United States military could go after scammers operating from foreign compounds. It could treat the economic targeting of American citizens as acts of economic war. It chooses not to. Freedom is not free, and when your country chooses to literally not fight for your freedom, it's hardly any wonder that your freedoms are eroded.

Remember XKCD 538: https://xkcd.com/538/ Cybersecurity and physical security are fundamentally linked.

Scammers can operate from literally any country in the world, in any location where they have access to the internet. The idea of the military busting into a Bin Laden-style scammer compound is very romantic, but plenty of these operate from regular offices or homes, and it’s trivial for someone new to get into the scamming business if a big scammer is taken down.

People forget both why the US invaded Afghanistan in the first place, and why US financial sanctions are so effective. The US invaded Afghanistan, a country whose government was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, because that government refused to extradite OBL and other senior Taliban leadership, to bring them to justice in the United States. US financial sanctions are so effective because they cut off foreign institutions from the US financial system if those institutions do business with those who harm Americans and American interests. Soft power is backed by hard power, first against organizations hosted by governments willing to cooperate with the US, and eventually against governments unwilling to cooperate.

That scammers can operate from anywhere is beside the point. More often than not, law enforcement and the military know where that is. A conscious decision is made not to prioritize or fund fighting it.

That’s easy when you’re dealing with people operating in countries where your existing relationship is poor or non-existent. There’s nothing practical that country can do to fight back against U.S. demands.

But try applying that approach to India or China. Do you think those countries are going to allow the U.S. military to operate on their home turf, shooting at their citizens, and not retaliate? It doesn’t even have to be military retaliation, the U.S. economy is heavily intertwined with those countries, just look at the consequences of Trumps tariffs. Do you honestly think U.S. citizens would be willing to trade off the trade benefits of working with those countries, just so you run a military raid on building of scammers?

> Do you think those countries are going to allow the U.S. military to operate on their home turf, shooting at their citizens, and not retaliate?

It's not related to scamming, but the US did just bomb Iranian nuclear facilities; the reaction was a face-saving gesture that was intentionally weak so as to de-facto de-escalate. So the answer to your question is basically yes. The costs of a wider war are too large to the host country to make it worth it to continue to allow scammers to operate freely.

> just look at the consequences of Trumps tariffs. Do you honestly think U.S. citizens would be willing to trade off the trade benefits of working with those countries, just so you run a military raid on building of scammers?

Don't you realize that Trump's election, his tariffs, all this is due to popular sentiment that the US was getting the raw end of the deal in its foreign affairs, that there was a need to, literally, put America First? If anything, such ideas, to have targeted attacks and enforcement aimed at the exact actors targeting American citizens, have been at their most popular in decades, at least since the Iraq war went off the rails.