"Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?"

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

> Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?

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.

>Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?

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.

It also assumes we'd have records of investments outside the US/EU market to begin with.

We also dont know how much money China is investing in govt spyware either.

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.

> why would you expect the US not to be the largest investor?

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.

Enterprises are generally not customers of serious CNE vendors.

Cloud-based Enterprise Security Solution, thats important! ;-)

This is a big step beyond just enterprise EDR/MDM

Hacking personal devices goes way beyond enterprise security. It is cybercriminal behavior.

Microsoft Teams and O365 suite are as well.

It is illegal for an employer to hack your phone.

Investment in these firms does not equate to improved national security. Existing US government programs exceed the capabilities of these firms. A purpose for contracting with these firms is to evade the significant legal oversight present in the NSA, CIA, and FBI computer network exploitation programs.

US and Israel are the the global cyber threat.

I suspect that in the very near future, the latter will dramatically decrease and the former dramatically increase. I wonder how that tradeoff will be perceived.

> I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still.

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.

The problem is that when laws no longer apply to certain individuals in our government, we no longer have rule of law at all, because a law is inherently universal. The US is rotting from the head.

At least you have freedom… in some sense.

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Well, you're definitely not going to get the latter two, and the only guarantee about the first one is that they will definitely be used against enemies of the state.

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.