FBI to tech industry: China, Russia are blackmailing your employees into spying

FBI to tech industry: China, Russia are blackmailing your employees into spying(protocol.com)

20 points by nothinggoesaway 4 years ago | 9 comments

I've had a position for a while that we need to rethink our databases such that privacy is a first class citizen to minimize the potential space to "hook into" sensitive information.

Databases have access control mechanisms that scale to an organization, but web scale demands access control for the world which means that every developer working with a DB must invent their own access control to the data on behalf of their users. This basically means the database is open to all developers in a company.

Given the emerging regulatory environment, I suspect there is room to launch new database technology such that access control is an atomic feature built in.

I've experimented with this using my programming language for board games, and it is surprisingly amazing. I can model data schema and privacy at the same time, and I love it. http://www.adama-lang.org/

MichaelZuo 4 years ago |

I’ve never hear of ‘protocol.com’ before so I went to look at their about statement: ‘ Protocol is a new media company from the publisher of POLITICO. We focus on the people, power and politics of tech, with no agenda and just one goal: to arm decision-makers in tech, business and public policy with the unbiased, fact-based news and analysis they need to navigate a world in rapid change.’

I’m fairly certain Politico is widely considered to have an agenda of some sort. See one of their strange publishing decisions from wikipedia: ‘ In March 2019 Politico was again accused of anti-semitism when it published an article depicting imagery of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders next to money trees. Sanders, one of two Jewish candidates for the 2020 US presidential election, was targeted for the amount of wealth he accumulated over his lifetime.[63] Politico staff writer Michael Kruse wrote the article detailing the senator's wealth, writing that Sanders "might still be cheap", according to one of the senator's friends, "but he's sure not poor", which was criticised as combining two anti-Semitic tropes (Jews are cheap; Jews are rich). Politico's official Twitter account used the quote to share the story; the tweet was later deleted.[64]’

jjk166 4 years ago | |

Anyone claiming to have no agenda and no bias is wrong. Maybe they're lying, maybe they just lack introspection, but anything more than a monkey with a typewriter will be written by a person with various pre-conceived notions, opinions, past experiences, value judgements, and aspirations which will bias whatever they create. Even if a person genuinely desires to be unbiased and actively takes steps to counteract their biases, their choice of steps to take and how far to take them are themselves biased.

At least with an institution that acknowledges its agenda you can reasonably take their biases into account. For most agendas, it is still in an institution's best interest to be generally accurate. You just need to know when to take things with a grain of salt. Unfortunately with no known agenda, there's no way to know when that is.

trompetenaccoun 4 years ago |

It's not just IP theft though, it's naive to think the CCP doesn't use any relevant information they can get for political and military purposes. We're in a new cold war, it seems many Americans haven't realized it yet.

phendrenad2 4 years ago |

https://archive.md/PFRY0

captainredbeard 4 years ago |

Wouldn't any thinking citizen immediately turn to a three-letter agency when this happens? The only way to get in worse trouble than whatever they fear from the blackmail would be to act as an agent of China/Russia.

jjk166 4 years ago | |

> Chinese government agents threatened to deny an employee's mother dialysis back in China if he didn't steal proprietary information from a large hardware/software company.

What's an american three-letter agency going to do in such a situation? Write an angry letter to the CCP? I'm a proud patriot, but if given the choice between protecting a large company's IP and my mother's life, I'm choosing the latter without a moment's hesitation.

quantified 4 years ago | |

You’d like to think, but an immigrant or first-gen citizen might not trust the TLA agency very much, especially if the first letter is F. High-profile houndings scare off tipsters. Then you try to assess whether the TLA will actually help your relative back home or only get them killed.

asdadsdad 4 years ago |

It's really sad that the US is still not treating China as the threat it is to American IP and sovereignty.