Russia's best anti-US play right now is to offer massively cheap bandwidth between China/Korea/Japan, South Asia, and Europe.
Yes, they will have to look after it. No, it won't be cheap. But in terms of intelligence gathering, it has the potential to significantly impact the US' ease of access to huge bodies of information by cutting North America out of the heart of the internet.
At this point, I really wish someone would do that. IMO the US has had its time and it's time they started getting cut out more. Having said that, I'm not sure if anyone would trust services coming out of Russia.
"Having said that, I'm not sure if anyone would trust services coming out of Russia."
It may be worth reminding people that if the US currently seems to be heading into a police state, that Russia within living memory has manifested one.
I'm all for holding the US accountable, but let's not collectively be idiots and think that this is all uniquely a US problem, and that therefore we can just stop worrying about everywhere else in the world and let them do whatever because they aren't the US, they must be awesome. We're still criticizing the US for heading in a direction that quite a few other major countries have already arrived at. It's great criticism, it's legitimate concerns, but don't get overexcited and give everybody else a pass.
Can anyone say with a straight face that Russia won't sniff Internet traffic with the same basic purposes and approaches, either now or anytime in, say, the next ten years? I sure wouldn't bet any money on that claim.
- If the US becomes a totalitarian regime, then all of your data can be used to imprison you for political transgressions. If you live in the US, but your data is in Russia, the Russians aren't going to care about your political transgressions (e.g. calling for a protest) against the US government.
- If your data is in a different country than where you are physically located, then there is less of a chance of your local machine being compromised. For example, Russia is going to be less likely to send an agent to the US to bug a computer (e.g. hardware keylogger) unless you are a really high-value target.
In my opinion the problem is having an entity like the US. If it were a lot of smaller, less powerful countries this wouldn't be an issue. If one of those countries tried crap like this all businesses could just leave. But the US has such a large market, companies are willing to put up with insane amounts of BS to maintain access to it. And let's be honest; at this point only the opinion of the companies matters to the US government.
The attraction is that it provides greatly needed decentralization for the internet at large. It doesn't solve the spying problem, but it does contribute to solving the global hegemon with turnkey totalitarian surveillance problem in a meaningful way that both Russia and the rest of the world can derive value from.
Not sure, I wouldn't be surprised if other regions now take action to stop this happening again. I'm not sure what sort of bureaucratic solution the EU will come up with but I'm hoping they're annoyed enough to do something.
Yes, they will have to look after it. No, it won't be cheap. But in terms of intelligence gathering, it has the potential to significantly impact the US' ease of access to huge bodies of information by cutting North America out of the heart of the internet.