US is the ultimate double standard with cybersecurity – violating democracy, power balance and privacy

NSA has been coming out with all these charges against China going after our secrets, our information, and so forth. It’s caused the Congress to give enormous amounts of money to NSA, this money for defensive use against the Chinese and so forth. What never comes out is the U.S. offensive capability against the rest of the world. The U.S. – there’s nobody that can even compare to the U.S. We’ve got an enormous Cyber Command. They’re expanding NSA’s secret city by a third to accommodate 14 new buildings, 10 parking garages, a new enormous supercomputer center – all this for this new, very secret Cyber Command. And it’s dedicated largely to offensive, to creating wars, not preventing wars. 21 Our leaders tend to paint the United States as being an innocent victim. However, more often than not the United States is a perpetrator. As the documents leaked by Ed Snowden confirmed, the focus of CYBERCOM isn’t on deterring attacks, it’s about launching them. In many instances these attacks are launched to acquire a strategic economic advantage and impose U.S. dominion abroad. In the end, it’s probably safe to assume that everyone is spying on everyone else. They always have and probably always will. Though at the same time, it’s also important to recognize that not all espionage programs are the same, and that scale matters. Given the amount of tax money our leaders throw at it, the United States, with its army of private sector contractors, steals secrets on a level both domestically and internationally that is unsurpassed. When it comes to breaking into networks and collecting sensitive information the United States is admittedly in a class all by itself. Journalist Glenn Greenwald elaborates on the repercussions of this fact: That the U.S. government – in complete secrecy – is constructing a ubiquitous spying apparatus aimed not only at its own citizens, but all of the world’s citizens, has profound consequences. It erodes, if not eliminates, the ability to use the Internet with any remnant of privacy or personal security. It vests the U.S. government with boundless power over those to whom it has no accountability. It permits allies of the U.S. – including aggressively oppressive ones – to benefit from indiscriminate spying on their citizens’ communications. It radically alters the balance of power between the U.S. and ordinary citizens of the world. And it sends an unmistakable signal to the world that while the U.S. very minimally values the privacy rights of Americans, it assigns zero value to the privacy of everyone else on the planet. 22 This double standard has serious consequences. It illustrates that U.S. leaders are unwilling to adhere to the values and principles that they claim to represent. Whistleblowers have exposed our political elite as untrustworthy. Having lost its moral authority in this domain, the United States cannot hope to name and shame cyber offenders. The ethereal bindings of soft power have dissolved, leaving only a dangerous example that other nations can follow.