Sanctions on Iran are justified. But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
US sanctions alone are responsible for nearly 565,000 deaths/year around the world.[1]
The UN Human Rights Council just confirmed US blockade against Cuba violates human rights and international law, citing Article 33 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment.[2]
They can only do that through an "SSL added and removed here ;-)"-like 'cooperation' and not through passive listening because with forward secrecy a certificate key doesn't secure the transport encryption directly. They could actively MITM outside the perimeter of the target by issuing a new certificate, but that would show up on CT logs.
tls1.3 you can fully mitm with nice green padlock, its much easier if you have access to CAs where most big 'trusted' are US based. that being said a lot of govt for their services use their own ones and what is trusted and not trusted in CA land is highly dubious at best. try looking at all those weird nooneheardofthem names in the CA bundles on modern systems.
besides that its quite likely they will have intercepted most key exchanges since thats still a problem and pretty easy to see happening if you say, tap the backbone -_-.
US and few other have really futuristic capabilities here. its hard to imagine snowden was 14 years of secret innovation ago... it has only gotten much worse friend.
> - Threatened to exterminate Persians civilization, blown up bridges, killed children and destroyed civilian infrastructure
Iran threatens that all the time "Death to America" so if they don't like someone saying it back to them maybe they should stop?
If you want to make these kinds of body count claims, well for starters Iran killed over 30,000 of its own people recently (who knows maybe they've killed tens of thousands more over the years).
Iran also made the Iraq war worse by funding insurgents, which opposed the US and the government of Iraq (which is doing much better now as a country than it was under Saddam anyway) so they are partially responsible for some of those deaths.
But let's continue with this logic. While we're at it why don't we sanction China? Common estimates suggest 10s of millions dead from the Great Leap Forward (no it's not any different when you kill your own people, arguably much worse). Dramatic repression in places like Hong Kong, and continuing to threaten democratic Taiwan.
Why aren't you clamoring to sanction China if you're going to bring up Japan and Vietnam? Well that's because your logic is unsound, never mind the continued hyper-focus on being critical of the United States only. Maybe all of these deaths are actually on the hands of Europeans who partitioned these gulf states in the first place. Why was France in Vietnam? Why was the UN in Korea?
> Iran threatens that all the time "Death to America" so if they don't like someone saying it back to them maybe they should stop?
Have you ever thought to pause and wonder why they say that?
Suppose you discovered that a UK oil company on your soil had been robbing you blind, and so you decided to nationalise your oil industry. In response to this, the UK and the US overthrew your government and installed a puppet regime. In this situation, I’m sure you would form a highly unfavourable view of the United States.
> Have you ever thought to pause and wonder why they say that?
Yes I have, it's because authoritarian regimes need eternal, external enemies to mask their own failures as they pilfer the country. You talk about Iran being robbed blind, nobody forced them to spend all of their oil revenue funding militants in other countries that kill people while Tehran runs out of water and their people suffer.
You seem to have this Euro-centric view that countries like Iran aren't responsible for their behavior or that they must be innocent because of some activities going on 70+ years ago (never mind, well, general history +- 30 or more years) but given that there are only a select few countries who are experiencing such circumstances (Iran, North Korea, Cuba) while most countries are just getting along peacefully, it makes more sense to understand that these countries are simply by virtue of their repressive governments the ones who are the actual problem. Iran can stop trying to build nuclear weapons and funding militants and then their problems will be solved.
The world doesn't have to tolerate bad behavior now just because of alleged American or British bad behavior in the past. If you want to argue that Iran gets to be forever mad about 1953, then maybe the US gets to be mad at Canada for 1812?
But you can take a step back and ask, well, what's the guiding framework here?
Is it arbitrarily picking certain time periods to make a point? Why do we go back to "Japan" and World War II when Japan started the war and was massacring and colonizing people throughout east Asia?
Why wasn't Germany mentioned in the body count? Dresden is a popular one that comes to mind.
Why do we only focus on lives lost? Maybe America saved 10,000,000 Chinese from Japanese occupation so on balance we're saving lives?
Yeah lets take a step back to 1953 when the British overthrew their government for wanting more profits from their oil. This lead directly to the revolution in 79, in the meantime the western "aligned" leader had suppressed all opposition except religions leaders so they were able to take over.
Now you know why they shout death to America. Would you also like to know that al qaeda didn't just hate american "freedom"?
Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?
If you want the Iranian people to engage in a forever war against the West, this is the kind of attitude you must hold.
“Some arbitrary injustice done by dead people forever justifies us to do whatever we want” isn’t a viable political or culturally progressive route to go down. Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran? Do they need a nuclear bomb to get over it? Will they stop hanging gay people, helping Russia, and providing militia support to destabilize Arab countries once they get what they want (whatever that is)? What date or specific thing do they need?
Can anyone say?
Of course not. Because totalitarian regimes always have to obsess over past injustices, perceived or real, to drum up support for the regime so that it can continue to hold power against the best interests of their people. It masks their own failures, like Tehran running out of water because their government spent all their money bombing innocent people.
> Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?
People often ask these questions as if they're unanswerable or as if any answer would essentially be arbitrary.
What you need to do is look at contemporary global systems of inequality and consider their roots. For this it would seem British imperialism is often a sensible place to go to, in this case almost certainly.
That seems like a different kind of criticism, one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality and injustice that were instantiated by broader colonial powers and conflict, whether that's the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, or Persian, for that matter.
We're not talking about global systems or inequality which have innumerable reasons, but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.
> one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality
The UK was spoken of in the particular because of its long and violent history in Iran. We could point to any number of things like Anglo-Persian oil, the 1941 occupation or the 1953 which was previously mentioned.
Countries like Portugal and the Netherlands simply don't have that history in the Iranian context. Of course if we were speaking about somewhere like Indonesia then we would foreground other colonial powers.
There is also of course much that should be said about broader colonial history but the question above was why do we bring up British wrongdoing rather than ancient Persian history.
> but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior
"Bad behaviour" is your terminology. We're talking about why they have sanctions imposed on them.
> and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.
No-one else was talking about this but you, and it feels like it was only raised in an attempt to undermine genuine concerns about legacy issues.
You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced. I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.
> Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran?
Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?
> Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?
We've tried but then they fund all these militias and kill lots of people and keep trying to build nuclear bombs. What if they stop doing those things?
> You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced.
By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Do you remember (or are you even aware) of things like the Atoms for Peace program? Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets? Arab nations also supported Iraq during the war. You are over-simplifying and cherry-picking while ignoring the fact that international relations is a lot more complicated than "country did X, therefore enemies for all time". USS Cole, Lebanon, it's not like Iran is innocent. And before you go and say well what about 1953, well then you can just keep going back to some other slight or injustice. If you want to live in a world of forever wars, by my guest. I think we should give peace a chance but that requires Iran to stop certain activities that simply do not serve anyone but a tiny minority of theocrats and despots.
> I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.
Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them. Iran's autocratic government hates us and they can't pursue a path of peace because authoritarian regimes need external enemies to direct popular anger against to cover up for their own shortcomings. It's a common playbook that we're all well aware of.
No we didn't. Well, we tried the JCPOA eventually, but that got nuked by Trump.
> By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam.
Yeah, thanks for killing the guy you used to gas and slaughter our people. All water under the bridge now, even though you provided that support for him to gas and kill us.
> Atoms for Peace program
How is this relevant?
> Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets?
They seized them when they overthrew the Shah.
> I think we should give peace a chance
Then the US should show some good faith and release frozen funds and lift sanctions. To expect Iran to weaken themselves when the west has shown perfidy time and time again is, frankly, ridiculous. The war going on now has only made that more impossible.
> Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them.
They may not hate the average American, but they hate our ruling class. And I assure you, our ruling class hates them all. They are racist fascists, it's what they do. You are naive if you think people like Rubio or Trump give two shits about Iranians. They want to destabilize a regional power and exploit natural resources. The best way to do that would be to throw Iran into chaos so no one faction controls power. It would be another Iraq situation and millions of Iranians would die.
The United States have been effing up in the Middle East since 1947. We can’t seem to get anything right, and with every involvement, we just get weaker eventually like the British we’re going to run out of money and resources, and Russia is following the same path.
That’s a completely fair take. Countries are free to enact sanctions against the us just like they are free to enact sanctions against Iran if that’s what they want to do.
The US is starting to have more countries look to other avenues and several of our closest friends are leading the charge. I would like to believe that after the current nightmare is over, we can put several things right but that’s a big if.
Sanctions for human rights violations would be justified only if they would be applied equally towards any country where certain human rights violations happen.
Unfortunately, USA has never applied any sanctions equally against countries with equivalent human rights violations, which proves that "human rights violations" have never been the true reason for those sanctions, but only a cover story.
When I was young and I was listening the US propaganda emitted through "Voice of America", I actually believed a good part of it. Unfortunately, history has proven that practically none of it was true and many listeners like myself were too naive if they believed any of it.
Moreover, the so-called "sanctions" of USA are not true sanctions. True sanctions would identify a precise behavior of the sanctioned country that is the cause of the sanctions and USA would promise that the sanctions would be terminated whenever the sanctioned country would stop those actions. Those would be true "sanctions" because they would have a chance to alter the behavior of the sanctioned countries.
As it is now, no sanctioned country would change anything in what they do, even when they are "sanctioned", because they know very well that the official reasons for the sanctions are not the true reasons and whatever they do about "human rights violations" and the like will not influence in any way whether the sanctions will be terminated or not.
Many of the official reasons for various US sanctions are so ridiculous that I wonder how the US politicians are able to utter them with a straight face.
For instance, there are many Chinese companies which are sanctioned because they might provide services or products for the Chinese Army or for the Chinese government.
??? Of course they do that. Any US company that makes anything of value will also provide services or products to the US military and government. The same will do any company in any country for their military and government.
In reality, the sanctioned Chinese companies have always been those which make consumer products that provided too much competition for US companies, like those that make DRAM modules and SSDs, so we have to thank the US sanctions for the huge price increases that have stolen money from people all over the world.
Regarding "sponsorship of extremism abroad", that is also questionable. Iran has supported various organizations which want to fight against Israel, but Israel has remained at war since its creation and the reason why they are still at war and they have never made peace with their enemies is because this was the wish of the Israeli government, who prefers to be at war than at peace.
There have existed opportunities of peace for Israel, but whenever there were chances for peace the forces within Israel that are against peace have prevented it, e.g. by the murder of the prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 or by the sabotage of the prime-minister Ehud Barak by Ariel Sharon and Likud in 2000.
As long as Israel will not implement an acceptable closure for the events from its creation and for their consequences, there will be people willing to fight against it, and because Israel has a crushing military superiority, the only form of fight are the "terrorist" actions. The existence of the "terrorists" is a choice made by Israel, more precisely by certain elites from Israel, for whom the continuous state of never-ending war has been extremely profitable.
I have worked for many years in Israel and more than 90% of the people that I encountered there were very nice people, but I have also seen some very bad people, who of course, like in any country, were concentrated in the government and in the management of companies, so they had much more influence than the majority.
I pitied a lot my Israeli co-workers, because they were exploited to a degree that would not be possible in most countries. Only USA might come close with its "employment at will", which gives disproportionate power to the employer.
In Israel, employees have to work much harder than in most other countries and nobody could protest against that, because that would be considered as unpatriotic, i.e. the priority for everybody is to work as hard as possible, to maintain the technological and military superiority of Israel, for fear that otherwise their neighbors would come and cut their throats. This kind of work discipline is of course very desirable for the owners of the companies, so for them it is good that Israel is permanently at war and under the menace of "terrorist" attacks.
The term "terrorist" is just an euphemism for enemies with which Israel is at war and with which it desires no peace. Moreover, even if there have been a lot of more or less innocent Israeli victims (but all have chosen willingly to be part of a military conflict), Israel has always succeeded to kill a much greater number of "terrorists" or persons related to them or persons who just happened to be close to them. Israel does not want to make any concessions for peace, because it reckons that peace will be obtained eventually, over the dead bodies of all enemies, but there is no hurry for that, because war is good for the economy.
In these circumstances, applying "sanctions" against countries who "support terrorists" has no legal basis, but it is just joining the conflict between Israel and its enemies, as an ally of Israel.
Of course any sovereign country may do this, but they should present it as what it is, i.e. as taking sides in a conflict, and not as something which has any legal or ethical reasons.
The difference is that in America, they don't torture and imprison the mother of a murder victim for an Instagram post on charges of disturbing national security and public unrest.
The one-party-state and leader-for-life thing is a bit more substantial than egg eating habits. It's all fun and games while they're increasingly productive and not very internationally assertive but that won't last forever.
Human rights violations, violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, violations of related UNSC Resolutions, sponsorship of terrorism, and many others.
We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.
It's not "their" president, Iranians didn't elect him. Khomeini was a religious extremist who only months ago presided over the murder of ten thousand protesters and we should shed not one tear.
He was elected by a so-called council of experts. Those experts are elected by the people, although screened by the council of constitutional guards. The council consists of six lawyers assigned by the leader and six lawyers elected by the parliament. (There's a parliament and a civil president.)
Iran is a republic. It became a republic in 1979 on a national referendum. Before that it was a monarchy. That monarchy used to be limited since 1941, but in 1953 it was restored as a result of an overthrow backed by US and Britain. The cause of that was that the civil government tried to nationalize oil companies. The last monarch is in exile but, apparently, hopes to return to power if the US wins.
The West is a fantastic liar and a tremendous used car salesman. There's a short story by Mark Twain how he tried to run for a governor. Satirical, but truthful. Yet somehow the West managed to sell the idea that a regular shitshow of this kind is a pinnacle of state development, that states who do not run it are, of course, oppressors and oppressed, and that any means against them are thus justified.
This is not a good question to ask. It's not for what. It's to prevent what.
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
> Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
I keep hearing from consumers of Islamofascist narratives about the “aggressive expansionism” of Israel. Can you tell me by how many square miles Israel expanded control over in total in the past 50 years?
I live (with a short intermission when I lived in the EU) in the Middle East, so, outside of reading the local news, sometimes I can just look out of the window.
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
Multipolarity is inevitable. You can’t forcefully hold most of the world’s population down, especially when you already shipped off your manufacturing capacity to earn a few bucks.
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.
Well, if it's inevitable, then we are facing a long stretch of history when everybody is having a bad time... And by that I mean that it's going to be worse than it is today. War will become a new normal for most people in the world, just like it was before the world wars.
War is the historical norm. The relative quiet of the Cold War across Western Eurasia, Japan, and Anglo nations was an aberration. Most of the world still experienced major conflicts during and after this period, including Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and of course the Middle East. After the Cold War, conflict spread into Russia and Eastern Europe.
The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't like where this is going :)
Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.
So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...
One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.
Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"
Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...
So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)
Maybe I wasn’t clear, I mean that singular, nation-state issued (but internationally held) reserve currencies always fail, whether they are backed by “hard” currency or not. Keynes’s idea is an attempt to solve the problem, and as you mentioned it has not been tested.
the whole point of economic sanctions, as besset himself said, is to make people frustrated in order to create chaos and uprisings, people fighting each other, having a failed nation, and ready to be targeted by US/israel to turn it into all other israel neighbors. since israel existence is only through killing and destruction. stealing its oil like Venezuela is another goal.
human rights is just an excuse. how many millions US has killed in west asia you think?
good news is that nothing last forever. one day it gets back to you.
The point of economic sanctions is to act like a several % ball and chain around economic growth so over a generation or two whoever you've applied them to is impoverished, relatively speaking, and don't have much of a surplus to spend really resisting whatever you (or your regional buddies) are trying to do that they wouldn't like.
> "Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt have made peace with Israel"
The governments may have, but I can assure you the average citizen of those countries haven't, as they still have morals and haven't got US funding to buy their morals.
No one is claiming that there isn’t plenty of hate for Israel in the Middle East. Those citizens, OP, and you buy the Islamofascist narrative of “Israel attacks all its neighbors” when in reality Israel has had peace with half its neighbors for decades - the neighbors who have agreed not to attack Israel and handle their own terrorists themselves.
Much worse, this will greatly improve their position with regards to wiretapping their own citizens.
Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...
I doubt Iranians needed sanctions as an excuse to install their own CAs and require their citizens to use them. Many authoritarian regimes require their citizens to use domestically produced networking software that is different degrees of compromised.
Is the implication that those who impose these sanctions can MITM anybody in the world except for countries under sanctions (which have to use their own root CAs)?
> But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.
The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.
If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.
> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.
As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
Because Iran is a member of BRICS and BRICS establishes its own payment system as an alternative to SWIFT: https://observerdiplomat.com/brics-officially-announces-fina... on top of which they have digital payment systems with globally the most users - all of that bypassing US banks, so that the US no longer has a means to control/sanction trade and payments.
TL;DR the world is leaving the premises where the US unilaterally decides which population should starve.
> As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?
It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.
I'm highly interested in the topic, and folks continue to write and respond to things that I disagree with. That's why you see my posts. This site (and life) shouldn't be an echo chamber.
The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.
No disagreement. It is very unfortunate that our policymakers seem to like the spectacle hurting the average person who happened to have been born in the wrong country more than going after the ones actually holding power.
Yes, Russian oligarchs use London and Dubai for laundering. Ironically, Iranians elites use Dubai, too while launching occasional missiles at UAE.
The only thing that would work is bribing the Iranian military (perhaps the non-IRGC part) like they did in Syria. Exile Iranians of course won't fight but they rather talk and demand that others fight.
They could stand up their own version of Let's Encrypt with less than 20 people and $5M/year. It is inevitable. Let's Encrypt had a budget of $3.6M and 13 employees as of 2019 [1], but I don't have recent funding and staff figures as of this comment (replies with context welcome!). Probably spread the cost across the BRICS to make it US sanction resistant.
It’s not merely about setting up a CA. The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public. It’s an isolated, privacy-invasive process.
Do you not believe the rest of the world will not move in this direction to decouple from the US? If not, you should consider it is more likely than before. Countries will mandate it if they want it done badly enough, and there is enough open source to own the entire stack (OS, browser, CLIs, etc). It is simply a matter of will, resources, and time, in that order. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time" as the saying goes. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? We can only watch to find out.
> The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public
Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs? Great, that'll show them.
As an amateur student of history and a professional watcher of television, I think one possible conclusion I've drawn is that the happy state is tiptoeing around your enemy forever. Or rather, tiptoeing with your enemy. That there is no "and the enemy was defeated and we returned to the Shire and the galaxy is finally at peace." Quietness, even if it's not called peace, is the virtuous state we should endeavour to preserve.
> [...] you can’t keep tiptoeing around your enemy forever.
If it doesn't cost the US anything and is strategically in their favor (via weakening an opponent), I really don't see why they couldn't have.
On top of that, it'll make others find alternatives quickly, as has already been happening with e.g. payments and other critical infrastructures. What an incredible waste of soft power built over decades.
> Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs?
How's the support for X.509 "Name Constraints" these days:
One possible alternative might be to add the ability for user configuration to substitute one certificate for another one (both will need the same public key and subject name, but the substitute will not be self-signed (since you do not have the private key)), and to use the data in the substitute certificate instead of the original. If the name constraints extension is implemented, then it would make this and other things possible. Since the substitute certificate will be considered trusted, it is not necessary for the substitute certificate to have a signature (if it does (e.g. because you got it from somewhere else instead of making it yourself), then the signature can be ignored), nor is it necessary for the substitute certificate to be issued by anyone (this applies even if it is the end certificate being substituted).
I think some servers do not send a copy of the root certificate to the client. In this case, what I described above might already be possible even if that feature has not already been added to existing implementations, as long as it does not require the installed certificate to be self-signed.
It would be simple today to abolish the use of CAs but it just a big cargo biz that makes money on nothing as usual based on peoples incompetence. For 99% of all sites today security would be handled better without CAs. People simply don't understand how it works.
All that was true until fairly recently. Today, you can get certificates for free and there’s more transparency than ever thanks to CT.
What would you suggest as an alternative? TOFU?
I could see that for local applications (e.g. making mDNS/.local and private IP certs TOFU capable by default would be amazing, and maybe even for some explicit hobbyist public TLDs?), but I don’t think I’d love it for my bank or email provider.
> It would be simple today to abolish the use of CAs […]
The main technical way I know of doing this would be by putting TLS public keys in DNS (DANE, RFC 6698), but then you have to make sure that DNS packets are not fiddled with, so you need to bring in DNSSEC.
That's a false concern, because the names the CAs are certifying are still DNS names. If your TLD reasssigns your DNS name out from under you, or even if your TLD starts returning false data on only selected queries, the CAs will be happy to issue a cert to the new holder.
It would be great to have a widely-recognizable pseudodomain out there where the names were key hashes. It would actually graft really easily into DNSSEC. The zone format doesn't have to change at all; you just declare that if the KSK hash matches the domain label under this specific TLD, you don't need to check upstream of that. Then you add a P2P protocol for getting the actual data, and start slowly pushing that protocol down the resolver tree to incrementally decentralize everything.
It is a reminder to go back to cash, ATMs and machines where you can enter you transactions instead of using the Internet.
There is no reason to give money to US middlemen for everything you do.
The whole of the EU should do this, too. I stopped using Internet banking after my bank moved from SMS Tan to hardware Tan generator (one of which didn't work) to forced mobile app. No thanks.
You select 'pay in cash' in the online checkout, walk to your neighborhood convenience mart, and they scan a QR code (or you give them a code if you don't have a smartphone) linked to your checkout session. It rings up the total, and you pay the clerk in cash. Once you hand over the cash and the clerk hits confirm in their POS system, the online store is notified instantly that you have paid, and your order moves directly into processing or shipping.
That's great for people that don't have any online-capable payment method, but I'd consider it a huge step backwards for those that do and are comfortable using it.
In Israel, we used to have post-office issued debit cards. You buy the card at the counter, with cash, and then it could be used for online payments, until you exhaust your credit. This is not entirely different from a bank, of course, but it allowed users to separate their purchases history from their income history.
Post office is also used for things like utility payments. You can pay them online, or write down the invoice id, the recipient, and pay with cash at the post office. I'm not sure how it works from the recipient perspective: i.e. how would you register your business with the post office, but, the existence of some such payments implies it should be possible.
NB. Also, technically, these services while physically provided in the post office are sometimes referred to as being provide by "postal bank". I'm not sure why it's called a bank though, since it doesn't provide key banking services s.a. loans or check-in accounts... Maybe it's just a "historic" name.
Wait but...if you use an ATM, you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time. Also, you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
> you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time.
This is highly country specific. In many countries, (at least domestic) ATM withdrawals are still free.
> you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
What exactly does a compromised ATM do in terms of identity theft that a POS terminal can't do? Both can read your card, which today is not a big problem anymore, and certainly not yours or your bank's.
People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.
I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.
It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.
Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).
I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.
Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.
I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.
So don't pay with it in unsafe settings. For them, crypto still can absolutely be a very valid means of saving money. When the local currency is inflationary and the banks restrict dollars, crypto saves the day wrt holdings. Transfer to bank account in local currency as needed.
And you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist. It is never acceptable, and it happens because of relaxed dotards who don't fight or prevent it. As a tourist, being taken advantage in dollars is what I consider scary.
You are suggesting that people should illegally hide their crypto from their government and taxation.
I assume if you live in say Argentina, then you really have little other choice.
But they don't have the knowledge to be safe, even though they strongly understand the need for security. I prefer not to advise other people to perform risky actions.
> you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist
And you should never tell other people what to do.
I am actually pretty okay with being generous and paying "too much". I've traveled to places where I'm relatively a fucking rich bastard. I don't see that I should be a selfish arsehole towards people that earn cents compared to me.
I hate foreign governments ripping me off because I know the money isn't going towards anything useful.
But I attempt to be thoughtfully generous towards individuals.
Although I avoid tipping culture (as a New Zealander it feels prostitutionally sleazy to me).
I remember some Germans telling me I was ruining it for other tourists by not haggling enough. Fuck those tight wankers.
Being generous is completely different from getting scammed. For example, one can be generous by not bargaining it the price is within affluent standards. One can however be scammed by being taken for a useless long taxi ride. The point is to reward the good and prevent the bad. It depends on whether you see yourself as a force for good in this world or not.
Tipping culture is a distortion of what tipping should be. Tipping should be a reward for "unexpectedly extraordinary" service - this by definition is a rare occurrence.
The government doesn't ask me when it prints money to pay the interest on its debt. It applies this inflation tax regardless of how much income tax one pays, which compounds hugely over the years. It is in this way the biggest scammer, and I believe I already declared my lack of support for scammers.
I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).
If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.
I don't support drug users in my home town either.
Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.
Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.
But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.
But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.
It works to buy darknet drugs, sure. Wake me up when I can go to the grocery store and buy some peaches. "Don't worry, cashier-bro, the transaction will only take 20 minutes to go through, trust me!"
It does work for groceries, although not at a physical store, because the store is controlled by government henchmen wrt to their payments. Fwiw, one can trivially by an Amazon gift card using cryptocurrency, using which one can then pay for online groceries.
As for transaction confirmation times, there are cryptocurrencies in common use that confirm nearly immediately. The lack of your knowledge shows.
It is a working means. The gift card is exclusively bought online. It's not usable in store anyway since there is no physical card. There is no issue with online purchases.
It doesn't load for me, but I have read the other comments.
There is the problem of TLS and X.509 being used with centralized authorities like this, even though it is not inherent to TLS nor to X.509 (although they were designed to be used in this way). In some circumstances, you can get a copy of the certificate (which might be self-signed) from somewhere else and then check that it matches in this circumstances. In other circumstances there are other things that can be done (e.g. TOFU, which has a different set of problems, but also has advantages in a different set of circumstances). What the security requirements are will depend on the circumstances, which can also depend on the user's intentions; they should not have to depend on a centralized authority.
(There is the issue that a single X.509 certificate cannot have multiple issuers, though. There is also the issue that X.509 certificates cannot contain unsigned extensions (they could be added after the signature, but an implementation might check for additional fields after the signature and reject a certificate that has any). Although an alternative schema can be made (I have done so), it would not work with the existing protocols.)
I may speak from ignorance, but why do SSL certificates depend on centralized CA?
If I'm an entity such as a bank, I should be able to sign my own certificate and provide the public keys to my clients which then can use it to both encrypt communications and to make sure you are talking with the entity you want to talk to. Am I missing anything?
So, you're right that this does work in theory, but it obviously doesn't scale, right? We can't have every person physically go to every storefront they want to purchase something from and then drive home with a USB stick. What if I in Minnesota want to buy something from Florida or France?
The role CAs play is to be a trusted identity verifier so we don't have to have millions of people driving around to do key exchanges in person.
That makes sense. The downside is that now if said CA has some interests in whether to re-issue a certificate or not, we have a problem.
Imagine that Cloudfare decides you are a bot and doesn't allow you to visit pages. You are going to have a problem because a lot of websites use it
I think the idea of a CA is good but it should be distributed somehow
Yeah, of course. Every solution has pros and cons, you gotta settle on the best one for the world you live in.
CAs are quite distributed already. You probably have a couple dozen or even a hundred different root CAs installed right now, and you can install whatever ones you like if necessary.
People don't really know how to install SSL certs, it's intentionally not easy especially on phones, and it's not clear that what they're installing only affects the bank. But yeah, the industry could make this semi-easy if there were a real need.
they can fetch the key or its hash from DNS. it's not like the current system is that much more involved. current system is basically a third party signed cache of such ownership claims validated based on ability of someone to modify DNS records.
All caches are just functionally useless layers..., so that's that.
You don't know that even with DNS validated certificates. There's no separate "entity" claim other than "anybody with DNS record modification rights for a given domain".
You can give out the same claim over DNS directly without any extra third party involvement in the form of CA.
I think it would be a good idea. TLS and X.509 would work better that way. Actually, both sides should have a certificate (the bank might issue a certificate to the customer).
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
Utterly moronic. We support the freedom of the Iranian people by forcing them to install a local government root CA in every browser. I mean at this rate they won't even have to buy their monitoring tech from China any more, just an old PC and a late 90s tarball of Squid
I mean, we very clearly do not support the freedom of the Iranian people. We deposed their democratically-elected leader in the 50s in favor of someone more pliable to Western interests, and when they rose up against their current government early in the year we went "Good luck! We're with you all the way!", then stood there when 30,000 of them were massacred. The well-being of ordinary Iranians has never been part of the calculus, so there's not really any actual hypocrisy.
Nobody gives a damn about the freedom of the Iranian people. They are a problem for Israel [1], so the US bombs them. The rest is just post-hoc justification.
[1] Note that every civilised country should be a problem for Israel- but Iran is the only one that actually dares opposing it.
These remarks are antisemitic. The people of Iran aren’t seeking a fight against imperialism. We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them. The fascist Shiite regime has taken everyone hostage, and it’s leading us toward a collective suicide.
So it would be fine if they were against any other country engaged in genocide, but not against Israel because it's Jewish? Is that your defense of Israel?
> We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them
You want to be allied with a genocidal state and the country that has forced you into poverty for the last decades?
This is super-dumb. The same thing is happening with Russian banks.
Their answer? They're now asking users to install root certs from the Russian ministry of communications. So it can now MITM all the encrypted traffic in Russia.
It already was. Stuxnet used trusted, signed Windows drivers to destroy Iran’s centrifuges back in 2010 and afaik we still don’t know exactly how the attackers did this.
I mean if you have ever tried to get Code signing certificate, it is absurd theater to get it working and your choice is like 3 different US certificate authorities.
Targeting civilians, hospitals, and food distribution networks is just normal warfare! Israel has a right to defend itself! Their land was promised to us thousands of years ago, and they have no right living on it!
I think you picked the wrong analogy. The US threatened unjustifiable acts targeting civilian population & infrastructure, and to a degree has followed through - for example bombing water facilities: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/us-bombs-iran-w...
Sanctions on Iran are justified. But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
Another example of why maximalist political hostility can be counterproductive. Leave an olive branch in sight, and you may work towards a mutually beneficial resolution, like the previous Iran nuclear deals. If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
US sanctions alone are responsible for nearly 565,000 deaths/year around the world.[1]
The UN Human Rights Council just confirmed US blockade against Cuba violates human rights and international law, citing Article 33 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment.[2]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
https://x.com/mhdksafa/status/2098058012145389602
https://xxcancel.com/mhdksafa/status/2098058012145389602
Russia recently moved to its own SSL certificates due to sanctions. Now you cannot use a bank without allowing the government to MITM you.
Can't US government MITM all of us, even with certificate transparency logs?
They can only do that through an "SSL added and removed here ;-)"-like 'cooperation' and not through passive listening because with forward secrecy a certificate key doesn't secure the transport encryption directly. They could actively MITM outside the perimeter of the target by issuing a new certificate, but that would show up on CT logs.
tls1.3 you can fully mitm with nice green padlock, its much easier if you have access to CAs where most big 'trusted' are US based. that being said a lot of govt for their services use their own ones and what is trusted and not trusted in CA land is highly dubious at best. try looking at all those weird nooneheardofthem names in the CA bundles on modern systems.
besides that its quite likely they will have intercepted most key exchanges since thats still a problem and pretty easy to see happening if you say, tap the backbone -_-.
US and few other have really futuristic capabilities here. its hard to imagine snowden was 14 years of secret innovation ago... it has only gotten much worse friend.
some of us voluntarily mitm ourselves via cloudflare ;)
Not without leaving potential proof that it happened behind
Dream on.
metadata is juicier anyway.
Hence why E2EE is so important, and where feasible, only accessible by you and not the other party
The biggest issue at scale is to confirm the identity of legitimate contacts without a single point of trust.
> Sanctions on Iran are justified
For what?
For human rights violations at home and sponsorship of extremism aboard.
I also believe many of our current "allies" in the region should face similar sanctions in case you are wondering.
> I also believe many of our current "allies" in the region should face similar sanctions in case you are wondering.
Interesting take, coming from a nation that has caused:
- 210,296 violent civilian deaths in IRAQ
- 500,000 civilians killed om Japan
- 70,000 civilians killed in Vietnam
- 46,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan
- 3,000 civilians killed in IRAN
- Threatened to exterminate Persians civilization, blown up bridges, killed children and destroyed civilian infrastructure
I think United States should be sanctioned.
> - Threatened to exterminate Persians civilization, blown up bridges, killed children and destroyed civilian infrastructure
Iran threatens that all the time "Death to America" so if they don't like someone saying it back to them maybe they should stop?
If you want to make these kinds of body count claims, well for starters Iran killed over 30,000 of its own people recently (who knows maybe they've killed tens of thousands more over the years).
Iran also made the Iraq war worse by funding insurgents, which opposed the US and the government of Iraq (which is doing much better now as a country than it was under Saddam anyway) so they are partially responsible for some of those deaths.
But let's continue with this logic. While we're at it why don't we sanction China? Common estimates suggest 10s of millions dead from the Great Leap Forward (no it's not any different when you kill your own people, arguably much worse). Dramatic repression in places like Hong Kong, and continuing to threaten democratic Taiwan.
Why aren't you clamoring to sanction China if you're going to bring up Japan and Vietnam? Well that's because your logic is unsound, never mind the continued hyper-focus on being critical of the United States only. Maybe all of these deaths are actually on the hands of Europeans who partitioned these gulf states in the first place. Why was France in Vietnam? Why was the UN in Korea?
> Iran threatens that all the time "Death to America" so if they don't like someone saying it back to them maybe they should stop?
Have you ever thought to pause and wonder why they say that?
Suppose you discovered that a UK oil company on your soil had been robbing you blind, and so you decided to nationalise your oil industry. In response to this, the UK and the US overthrew your government and installed a puppet regime. In this situation, I’m sure you would form a highly unfavourable view of the United States.
> Have you ever thought to pause and wonder why they say that?
Yes I have, it's because authoritarian regimes need eternal, external enemies to mask their own failures as they pilfer the country. You talk about Iran being robbed blind, nobody forced them to spend all of their oil revenue funding militants in other countries that kill people while Tehran runs out of water and their people suffer.
You seem to have this Euro-centric view that countries like Iran aren't responsible for their behavior or that they must be innocent because of some activities going on 70+ years ago (never mind, well, general history +- 30 or more years) but given that there are only a select few countries who are experiencing such circumstances (Iran, North Korea, Cuba) while most countries are just getting along peacefully, it makes more sense to understand that these countries are simply by virtue of their repressive governments the ones who are the actual problem. Iran can stop trying to build nuclear weapons and funding militants and then their problems will be solved.
The world doesn't have to tolerate bad behavior now just because of alleged American or British bad behavior in the past. If you want to argue that Iran gets to be forever mad about 1953, then maybe the US gets to be mad at Canada for 1812?
Your reply is pure, distilled whataboutism.
The premise of the OP is whataboutism.
But you can take a step back and ask, well, what's the guiding framework here?
Is it arbitrarily picking certain time periods to make a point? Why do we go back to "Japan" and World War II when Japan started the war and was massacring and colonizing people throughout east Asia?
Why wasn't Germany mentioned in the body count? Dresden is a popular one that comes to mind.
Why do we only focus on lives lost? Maybe America saved 10,000,000 Chinese from Japanese occupation so on balance we're saving lives?
Not clear how dump a laundry list of other countries crimes to deflect will help to address original claim
The original claim was an incoherent laundry list of made up statistics. I just pointed out the problems with it by extending the claims further.
Yeah lets take a step back to 1953 when the British overthrew their government for wanting more profits from their oil. This lead directly to the revolution in 79, in the meantime the western "aligned" leader had suppressed all opposition except religions leaders so they were able to take over.
Now you know why they shout death to America. Would you also like to know that al qaeda didn't just hate american "freedom"?
Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?
If you want the Iranian people to engage in a forever war against the West, this is the kind of attitude you must hold.
“Some arbitrary injustice done by dead people forever justifies us to do whatever we want” isn’t a viable political or culturally progressive route to go down. Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran? Do they need a nuclear bomb to get over it? Will they stop hanging gay people, helping Russia, and providing militia support to destabilize Arab countries once they get what they want (whatever that is)? What date or specific thing do they need?
Can anyone say?
Of course not. Because totalitarian regimes always have to obsess over past injustices, perceived or real, to drum up support for the regime so that it can continue to hold power against the best interests of their people. It masks their own failures, like Tehran running out of water because their government spent all their money bombing innocent people.
> Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?
People often ask these questions as if they're unanswerable or as if any answer would essentially be arbitrary.
What you need to do is look at contemporary global systems of inequality and consider their roots. For this it would seem British imperialism is often a sensible place to go to, in this case almost certainly.
That seems like a different kind of criticism, one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality and injustice that were instantiated by broader colonial powers and conflict, whether that's the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, or Persian, for that matter.
We're not talking about global systems or inequality which have innumerable reasons, but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.
> one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality
The UK was spoken of in the particular because of its long and violent history in Iran. We could point to any number of things like Anglo-Persian oil, the 1941 occupation or the 1953 which was previously mentioned.
Countries like Portugal and the Netherlands simply don't have that history in the Iranian context. Of course if we were speaking about somewhere like Indonesia then we would foreground other colonial powers.
There is also of course much that should be said about broader colonial history but the question above was why do we bring up British wrongdoing rather than ancient Persian history.
> but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior
"Bad behaviour" is your terminology. We're talking about why they have sanctions imposed on them.
> and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.
No-one else was talking about this but you, and it feels like it was only raised in an attempt to undermine genuine concerns about legacy issues.
You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced. I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.
> Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran?
Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?
> Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?
We've tried but then they fund all these militias and kill lots of people and keep trying to build nuclear bombs. What if they stop doing those things?
> You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced.
By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Do you remember (or are you even aware) of things like the Atoms for Peace program? Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets? Arab nations also supported Iraq during the war. You are over-simplifying and cherry-picking while ignoring the fact that international relations is a lot more complicated than "country did X, therefore enemies for all time". USS Cole, Lebanon, it's not like Iran is innocent. And before you go and say well what about 1953, well then you can just keep going back to some other slight or injustice. If you want to live in a world of forever wars, by my guest. I think we should give peace a chance but that requires Iran to stop certain activities that simply do not serve anyone but a tiny minority of theocrats and despots.
> I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.
Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them. Iran's autocratic government hates us and they can't pursue a path of peace because authoritarian regimes need external enemies to direct popular anger against to cover up for their own shortcomings. It's a common playbook that we're all well aware of.
> We've tried
No we didn't. Well, we tried the JCPOA eventually, but that got nuked by Trump.
> By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam.
Yeah, thanks for killing the guy you used to gas and slaughter our people. All water under the bridge now, even though you provided that support for him to gas and kill us.
> Atoms for Peace program
How is this relevant?
> Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets?
They seized them when they overthrew the Shah.
> I think we should give peace a chance
Then the US should show some good faith and release frozen funds and lift sanctions. To expect Iran to weaken themselves when the west has shown perfidy time and time again is, frankly, ridiculous. The war going on now has only made that more impossible.
> Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them.
They may not hate the average American, but they hate our ruling class. And I assure you, our ruling class hates them all. They are racist fascists, it's what they do. You are naive if you think people like Rubio or Trump give two shits about Iranians. They want to destabilize a regional power and exploit natural resources. The best way to do that would be to throw Iran into chaos so no one faction controls power. It would be another Iraq situation and millions of Iranians would die.
The United States have been effing up in the Middle East since 1947. We can’t seem to get anything right, and with every involvement, we just get weaker eventually like the British we’re going to run out of money and resources, and Russia is following the same path.
That’s a completely fair take. Countries are free to enact sanctions against the us just like they are free to enact sanctions against Iran if that’s what they want to do.
> "I think United States should be sanctioned."
They definitely should. Sick of the double standards. And the "USA can do no wrong but this tech in others' hands will be bad" takes.
[dead]
Does that include China? The only thing this is gonna lead to is an alternative system.
More countries turning away from the United States/Europe for good, this is another one of those cases of winning or without firing a shot.
I don't disagree, but that's not why they're being sanctioned
The US itself should be sanctioned by your listed metric.
The US is starting to have more countries look to other avenues and several of our closest friends are leading the charge. I would like to believe that after the current nightmare is over, we can put several things right but that’s a big if.
Isn’t that what they say the tariffs are?
USA sanctioned themselves?
Sanctions for human rights violations would be justified only if they would be applied equally towards any country where certain human rights violations happen.
Unfortunately, USA has never applied any sanctions equally against countries with equivalent human rights violations, which proves that "human rights violations" have never been the true reason for those sanctions, but only a cover story.
When I was young and I was listening the US propaganda emitted through "Voice of America", I actually believed a good part of it. Unfortunately, history has proven that practically none of it was true and many listeners like myself were too naive if they believed any of it.
Moreover, the so-called "sanctions" of USA are not true sanctions. True sanctions would identify a precise behavior of the sanctioned country that is the cause of the sanctions and USA would promise that the sanctions would be terminated whenever the sanctioned country would stop those actions. Those would be true "sanctions" because they would have a chance to alter the behavior of the sanctioned countries.
As it is now, no sanctioned country would change anything in what they do, even when they are "sanctioned", because they know very well that the official reasons for the sanctions are not the true reasons and whatever they do about "human rights violations" and the like will not influence in any way whether the sanctions will be terminated or not.
Many of the official reasons for various US sanctions are so ridiculous that I wonder how the US politicians are able to utter them with a straight face.
For instance, there are many Chinese companies which are sanctioned because they might provide services or products for the Chinese Army or for the Chinese government.
??? Of course they do that. Any US company that makes anything of value will also provide services or products to the US military and government. The same will do any company in any country for their military and government.
In reality, the sanctioned Chinese companies have always been those which make consumer products that provided too much competition for US companies, like those that make DRAM modules and SSDs, so we have to thank the US sanctions for the huge price increases that have stolen money from people all over the world.
Regarding "sponsorship of extremism abroad", that is also questionable. Iran has supported various organizations which want to fight against Israel, but Israel has remained at war since its creation and the reason why they are still at war and they have never made peace with their enemies is because this was the wish of the Israeli government, who prefers to be at war than at peace.
There have existed opportunities of peace for Israel, but whenever there were chances for peace the forces within Israel that are against peace have prevented it, e.g. by the murder of the prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 or by the sabotage of the prime-minister Ehud Barak by Ariel Sharon and Likud in 2000.
As long as Israel will not implement an acceptable closure for the events from its creation and for their consequences, there will be people willing to fight against it, and because Israel has a crushing military superiority, the only form of fight are the "terrorist" actions. The existence of the "terrorists" is a choice made by Israel, more precisely by certain elites from Israel, for whom the continuous state of never-ending war has been extremely profitable.
I have worked for many years in Israel and more than 90% of the people that I encountered there were very nice people, but I have also seen some very bad people, who of course, like in any country, were concentrated in the government and in the management of companies, so they had much more influence than the majority.
I pitied a lot my Israeli co-workers, because they were exploited to a degree that would not be possible in most countries. Only USA might come close with its "employment at will", which gives disproportionate power to the employer.
In Israel, employees have to work much harder than in most other countries and nobody could protest against that, because that would be considered as unpatriotic, i.e. the priority for everybody is to work as hard as possible, to maintain the technological and military superiority of Israel, for fear that otherwise their neighbors would come and cut their throats. This kind of work discipline is of course very desirable for the owners of the companies, so for them it is good that Israel is permanently at war and under the menace of "terrorist" attacks.
The term "terrorist" is just an euphemism for enemies with which Israel is at war and with which it desires no peace. Moreover, even if there have been a lot of more or less innocent Israeli victims (but all have chosen willingly to be part of a military conflict), Israel has always succeeded to kill a much greater number of "terrorists" or persons related to them or persons who just happened to be close to them. Israel does not want to make any concessions for peace, because it reckons that peace will be obtained eventually, over the dead bodies of all enemies, but there is no hurry for that, because war is good for the economy.
In these circumstances, applying "sanctions" against countries who "support terrorists" has no legal basis, but it is just joining the conflict between Israel and its enemies, as an ally of Israel.
Of course any sovereign country may do this, but they should present it as what it is, i.e. as taking sides in a conflict, and not as something which has any legal or ethical reasons.
> For human rights violations at home
reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality
reddit.com/r/PoliceBrutality
Oh yeah sorry this is "wHaTaBoUtIsM" so it makes our shit okay
The difference is that in America, they don't torture and imprison the mother of a murder victim for an Instagram post on charges of disturbing national security and public unrest.
> The difference is that
we eat eggs from the little end and they eat from the big end.
The one-party-state and leader-for-life thing is a bit more substantial than egg eating habits. It's all fun and games while they're increasingly productive and not very internationally assertive but that won't last forever.
Human rights violations, violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, violations of related UNSC Resolutions, sponsorship of terrorism, and many others.
We can wholeheartedly disagree with the US's war on Iran without pretending Iran is a 'good' international actor. It's a rogue state and has been for decades.
For retaliating against they president being assassinated and their country attacked. This is strictly against the rules based order.
It's not "their" president, Iranians didn't elect him. Khomeini was a religious extremist who only months ago presided over the murder of ten thousand protesters and we should shed not one tear.
He was elected by a so-called council of experts. Those experts are elected by the people, although screened by the council of constitutional guards. The council consists of six lawyers assigned by the leader and six lawyers elected by the parliament. (There's a parliament and a civil president.)
Iran is a republic. It became a republic in 1979 on a national referendum. Before that it was a monarchy. That monarchy used to be limited since 1941, but in 1953 it was restored as a result of an overthrow backed by US and Britain. The cause of that was that the civil government tried to nationalize oil companies. The last monarch is in exile but, apparently, hopes to return to power if the US wins.
The West is a fantastic liar and a tremendous used car salesman. There's a short story by Mark Twain how he tried to run for a governor. Satirical, but truthful. Yet somehow the West managed to sell the idea that a regular shitshow of this kind is a pinnacle of state development, that states who do not run it are, of course, oppressors and oppressed, and that any means against them are thus justified.
This is not a good question to ask. It's not for what. It's to prevent what.
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
There is only one country in the Middle East with an aggressive expansionist mentality, and it’s not Iran.
And what’s with the superpower commentary, you neglected to connect it to Iran and are you saying Russia is bigger than China?
It's what uncritically consuming propaganda does to a person. A whole world view and belief system that has no relation to reality.
> Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
I keep hearing from consumers of Islamofascist narratives about the “aggressive expansionism” of Israel. Can you tell me by how many square miles Israel expanded control over in total in the past 50 years?
I live (with a short intermission when I lived in the EU) in the Middle East, so, outside of reading the local news, sometimes I can just look out of the window.
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
Multipolarity is inevitable. You can’t forcefully hold most of the world’s population down, especially when you already shipped off your manufacturing capacity to earn a few bucks.
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.
Well, if it's inevitable, then we are facing a long stretch of history when everybody is having a bad time... And by that I mean that it's going to be worse than it is today. War will become a new normal for most people in the world, just like it was before the world wars.
War is the historical norm. The relative quiet of the Cold War across Western Eurasia, Japan, and Anglo nations was an aberration. Most of the world still experienced major conflicts during and after this period, including Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and of course the Middle East. After the Cold War, conflict spread into Russia and Eastern Europe.
The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't like where this is going :)
Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.
So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...
One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.
Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"
Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...
So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)
How can something "always fail" if it's never been tried? Negativity much?
Maybe I wasn’t clear, I mean that singular, nation-state issued (but internationally held) reserve currencies always fail, whether they are backed by “hard” currency or not. Keynes’s idea is an attempt to solve the problem, and as you mentioned it has not been tested.
Because the fascist mullahs’ regime wants the entire world to act according to its wishes. We’re lucky that North Korea doesn’t control any straits.
s/mullah/American/
They are not justified in the least bit.
the whole point of economic sanctions, as besset himself said, is to make people frustrated in order to create chaos and uprisings, people fighting each other, having a failed nation, and ready to be targeted by US/israel to turn it into all other israel neighbors. since israel existence is only through killing and destruction. stealing its oil like Venezuela is another goal. human rights is just an excuse. how many millions US has killed in west asia you think? good news is that nothing last forever. one day it gets back to you.
The point of economic sanctions is to act like a several % ball and chain around economic growth so over a generation or two whoever you've applied them to is impoverished, relatively speaking, and don't have much of a surplus to spend really resisting whatever you (or your regional buddies) are trying to do that they wouldn't like.
> all other israel neighbors
Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt have made peace with Israel and have had no issues since then.
You may have been misled by anti-Israel propaganda.
> "Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt have made peace with Israel"
The governments may have, but I can assure you the average citizen of those countries haven't, as they still have morals and haven't got US funding to buy their morals.
No one is claiming that there isn’t plenty of hate for Israel in the Middle East. Those citizens, OP, and you buy the Islamofascist narrative of “Israel attacks all its neighbors” when in reality Israel has had peace with half its neighbors for decades - the neighbors who have agreed not to attack Israel and handle their own terrorists themselves.
Much worse, this will greatly improve their position with regards to wiretapping their own citizens.
Depending on who you are, Western CAs can come with some availability problems, but thanks to certificate transparency, you don't even have to trust the CA if you mostly care about security. Take a wild guess as to whether an Iranian CA will support that...
I doubt Iranians needed sanctions as an excuse to install their own CAs and require their citizens to use them. Many authoritarian regimes require their citizens to use domestically produced networking software that is different degrees of compromised.
Is the implication that those who impose these sanctions can MITM anybody in the world except for countries under sanctions (which have to use their own root CAs)?
> But I worry this kind of action will just lead to the eventual rise of an alternative tech ecosystem in the long term, probably led by china and Russia. It will be bad for us, bad for people living under those regimes, but good for the regimes themselves because they will have the fullest control over their technology, without having to compromise with the West.
I'm not sure that isolating Iran in particular has much of an effect because countries don't want to be in Russia's orbit, China's orbit is Only Good for China, and so aside from a European-only/led system the best option would still be the current state/system.
The best solution to all of these problems is for Iran to just behave like pretty much all other countries, but in lieu of that and in lieu of us having a desire to really go to war in Iran, we're just going to have to take actions like this because we can't have this regime opposed to us and western values and pursuing nuclear weapons (prior to, during, and after JCPOA) but then enjoying the benefits of the American-led financial system.
If Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia want to get together and create their own crappy Intranet that nobody uses, well, more power to them. Hope they have fun.
> If push your opponent into a corner, then don't get upset when they jump over the wall into the wild where you can't catch them anymore. See also Chinese chips and AI.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the evolution of these arrangements. There's a lot of nuance here, but the United States helped get China into the WTO based on the premise that they'd liberalize and then what happened? State-directed investment, banning of competitor products, subsidized over-capacity to deindustrialize other countries, artificially cheap currency to boost exports. Russia? They were part of the The NATO-Russia Founding Act and then decided they'd rather do war and stuff. Iran? Won't stop pursuing nuclear weapons for no reason (among other things), so now their economy is going to tank. So it's really the opposite. Even when you think about the JCPOA, let's say it wasn't torn up. Why was/is Iran still funding militant groups that are destabilizing other countries in the region? The west, not just the US mind you, did its damned best to include these specific countries into the western rules-based order, allowed gross injustices and breaches of good conduct, and still tried only to now itself be backed into a corner (Iran, Russia invading Ukraine, Chinese economic destruction) and has to finally respond.
As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
> China's orbit is Only Good for China
BRICS begs to dffer.
BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
Isn't Brazil in South America?
> BRICS begs to dffer.
Why would that matter?
Because Iran is a member of BRICS and BRICS establishes its own payment system as an alternative to SWIFT: https://observerdiplomat.com/brics-officially-announces-fina... on top of which they have digital payment systems with globally the most users - all of that bypassing US banks, so that the US no longer has a means to control/sanction trade and payments.
TL;DR the world is leaving the premises where the US unilaterally decides which population should starve.
> As a civilization, and yes that includes folks in the EU even if you are mad at the current president, we need to stop assuming we're the problem or we're the bad guys by default and start holding other countries to account.
I remember your handle, ericmay, because you have been showing up in almost every thread about the tariffs or Iran and following this logic. Something Must Be Done, therefore Anything That Is Being Done Is Good. How dare you question if the Thing Being Done is actually against our interests? Do you not feel the warm fuzzy feeling of Something Being Done?
It's a frankly childish view of politics where virtue is all you need no matter the outcome. Time to grow up.
I'm highly interested in the topic, and folks continue to write and respond to things that I disagree with. That's why you see my posts. This site (and life) shouldn't be an echo chamber.
> Sanctions on Iran are justified
The main problem with sanctions is that it's the wrong people on the receiving end. Russian oligarchs and military businessmen have exactly zero problems managing their money, while ordinary people who flew russia into the EU - they face unsurmountable piles of unsolvable problems due to sanctions.
No disagreement. It is very unfortunate that our policymakers seem to like the spectacle hurting the average person who happened to have been born in the wrong country more than going after the ones actually holding power.
The average person is available, helpless and most importantly - their suffering is clearly visible to the voters.
Yes, Russian oligarchs use London and Dubai for laundering. Ironically, Iranians elites use Dubai, too while launching occasional missiles at UAE.
The only thing that would work is bribing the Iranian military (perhaps the non-IRGC part) like they did in Syria. Exile Iranians of course won't fight but they rather talk and demand that others fight.
Justified but extremely short sighted
Maybe it will force competition. One of America's best strengths is competitive dynamism which we have gotten away from.
[dead]
Then USA should also sanction USA, or Israel at least.
This seems like the kind of thing that the USA will explicitly grant an exception to.
It is clearly bad if the whole of Iran gets their own CA infrastructure which the NSA can't as easily spy on.
They could stand up their own version of Let's Encrypt with less than 20 people and $5M/year. It is inevitable. Let's Encrypt had a budget of $3.6M and 13 employees as of 2019 [1], but I don't have recent funding and staff figures as of this comment (replies with context welcome!). Probably spread the cost across the BRICS to make it US sanction resistant.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085559 (citations)
It’s not merely about setting up a CA. The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public. It’s an isolated, privacy-invasive process.
Do you not believe the rest of the world will not move in this direction to decouple from the US? If not, you should consider it is more likely than before. Countries will mandate it if they want it done badly enough, and there is enough open source to own the entire stack (OS, browser, CLIs, etc). It is simply a matter of will, resources, and time, in that order. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time" as the saying goes. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? We can only watch to find out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (citations)
(sysadmin/network admin/devops/infra engineer a lifetime ago, mostly familiar with what bootstrapping this looks like)
> Do you not believe the rest of the world will not move in this direction to decouple from the US?
Sure, but that will require more than 20 people, 5 million USD and the sole will of the Iranian government.
Different contexts. It is cheap to build your own Let's Encrypt, it takes more time and effort for the world to decouple. Both can be true.
> The CA certificates would have to be added to the trust stores of every operating system, browser, framework, and application, creating a sea of security risks for the public
Finaly one that acknowledges...
Sure they can, but very importantly, so far the US has not forced them to for extremely good reasons.
As just one example, you can take a guess as to whether such a CA will support certificate transparency...
Yeah now the NSA only contains the code of the browsers Iranians use, right down to the os and even firmware. Clearly a big loss ...
I guess you could say a loss is a loss ...
Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs? Great, that'll show them.
This was the most anti-colonialist move America had ever made, but you can’t keep tiptoeing around your enemy forever.
As an amateur student of history and a professional watcher of television, I think one possible conclusion I've drawn is that the happy state is tiptoeing around your enemy forever. Or rather, tiptoeing with your enemy. That there is no "and the enemy was defeated and we returned to the Shire and the galaxy is finally at peace." Quietness, even if it's not called peace, is the virtuous state we should endeavour to preserve.
> [...] you can’t keep tiptoeing around your enemy forever.
If it doesn't cost the US anything and is strategically in their favor (via weakening an opponent), I really don't see why they couldn't have.
On top of that, it'll make others find alternatives quickly, as has already been happening with e.g. payments and other critical infrastructures. What an incredible waste of soft power built over decades.
> Forcing their customers to install government-affiliated alternative CAs, in turn allowing the government to spy on its citizens more easily via mis-issued certs?
How's the support for X.509 "Name Constraints" these days:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1....
Would restricting it to only dot-ir domains be a mitigation?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ir
Why would the Iranian government put such a constraint in its own root certificate?
I guess now would be a great time for browsers/OSes to ship a "trust this CA, but only for this TLD/list of domains" feature.
One possible alternative might be to add the ability for user configuration to substitute one certificate for another one (both will need the same public key and subject name, but the substitute will not be self-signed (since you do not have the private key)), and to use the data in the substitute certificate instead of the original. If the name constraints extension is implemented, then it would make this and other things possible. Since the substitute certificate will be considered trusted, it is not necessary for the substitute certificate to have a signature (if it does (e.g. because you got it from somewhere else instead of making it yourself), then the signature can be ignored), nor is it necessary for the substitute certificate to be issued by anyone (this applies even if it is the end certificate being substituted).
I think some servers do not send a copy of the root certificate to the client. In this case, what I described above might already be possible even if that feature has not already been added to existing implementations, as long as it does not require the installed certificate to be self-signed.
This exists in Firefox at least, but I don’t think it’s easily exposed in the UI
It would be simple today to abolish the use of CAs but it just a big cargo biz that makes money on nothing as usual based on peoples incompetence. For 99% of all sites today security would be handled better without CAs. People simply don't understand how it works.
All that was true until fairly recently. Today, you can get certificates for free and there’s more transparency than ever thanks to CT.
What would you suggest as an alternative? TOFU?
I could see that for local applications (e.g. making mDNS/.local and private IP certs TOFU capable by default would be amazing, and maybe even for some explicit hobbyist public TLDs?), but I don’t think I’d love it for my bank or email provider.
> It would be simple today to abolish the use of CAs […]
The main technical way I know of doing this would be by putting TLS public keys in DNS (DANE, RFC 6698), but then you have to make sure that DNS packets are not fiddled with, so you need to bring in DNSSEC.
Exactly, and in some ways, DNS is even more centralized. At least there’s a choice of CAs independent of TLDs.
That's a false concern, because the names the CAs are certifying are still DNS names. If your TLD reasssigns your DNS name out from under you, or even if your TLD starts returning false data on only selected queries, the CAs will be happy to issue a cert to the new holder.
It would be great to have a widely-recognizable pseudodomain out there where the names were key hashes. It would actually graft really easily into DNSSEC. The zone format doesn't have to change at all; you just declare that if the KSK hash matches the domain label under this specific TLD, you don't need to check upstream of that. Then you add a P2P protocol for getting the actual data, and start slowly pushing that protocol down the resolver tree to incrementally decentralize everything.
20 years ago would have been a great time for that one.
The whole point with a CA is that you have a neutral third party participant. Kinda broken no matter how you look at it. Especially in this case.
Just like in russia and exactly because of sanctions. Excellent job, dear west.
CAs is the problem. Not who runs them...
It is a reminder to go back to cash, ATMs and machines where you can enter you transactions instead of using the Internet.
There is no reason to give money to US middlemen for everything you do.
The whole of the EU should do this, too. I stopped using Internet banking after my bank moved from SMS Tan to hardware Tan generator (one of which didn't work) to forced mobile app. No thanks.
How exactly do I use cash for online payments?
Commonly available in Latin America
www.pagoefectivo.la
You select 'pay in cash' in the online checkout, walk to your neighborhood convenience mart, and they scan a QR code (or you give them a code if you don't have a smartphone) linked to your checkout session. It rings up the total, and you pay the clerk in cash. Once you hand over the cash and the clerk hits confirm in their POS system, the online store is notified instantly that you have paid, and your order moves directly into processing or shipping.
That's great for people that don't have any online-capable payment method, but I'd consider it a huge step backwards for those that do and are comfortable using it.
Naturally, it is one of several payment options at checkout. Never the only option.
In Israel, we used to have post-office issued debit cards. You buy the card at the counter, with cash, and then it could be used for online payments, until you exhaust your credit. This is not entirely different from a bank, of course, but it allowed users to separate their purchases history from their income history.
Post office is also used for things like utility payments. You can pay them online, or write down the invoice id, the recipient, and pay with cash at the post office. I'm not sure how it works from the recipient perspective: i.e. how would you register your business with the post office, but, the existence of some such payments implies it should be possible.
NB. Also, technically, these services while physically provided in the post office are sometimes referred to as being provide by "postal bank". I'm not sure why it's called a bank though, since it doesn't provide key banking services s.a. loans or check-in accounts... Maybe it's just a "historic" name.
The problem is not online banking. The problem is the banks we use.
Accounting cash is extremely complicated and whether you like it or not, you will be forced to do an online transaction at some point.
Are you going to be wiring money across the country to buy stuff?
Instead of going back we should stop centralizing everything.
We are centralizing the internet with Cloudfare. We are centralizing mobile compute with Android/Apple
I don't want to be dependent on any of those platforms to access my bank
Also: please use a credit union and use mutually-owned insurance agencies. As a general statement, you'll be in way better hands.
Wait but...if you use an ATM, you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time. Also, you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
> you're going to be hit by ATM (read: middleman) fees every single time.
This is highly country specific. In many countries, (at least domestic) ATM withdrawals are still free.
> you massively increase your risk of getting hit by identity theft via compromised ATM.
What exactly does a compromised ATM do in terms of identity theft that a POS terminal can't do? Both can read your card, which today is not a big problem anymore, and certainly not yours or your bank's.
Cryptocurrency actually works and doesn't involve US middlemen under governmental oppression. It's a fact.
Also, they stopped capitalizing the "i" in "internet" some time ago. Wake up from the year 2000 already.
Hahaha, that’s a good joke
some ways of using crypto are pretty common in countries with high inflation rates
weak src: me, a citizen from a country with high inflation rates
It's not a joke. It's 100% true. People tend to be extremely uneducated wrt crypto, also favoring to dwell in their ignorance.
I spent months in South America and tried to use crypto in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. I was motivated because of this pro-crypto article: https://devonzuegel.com/inside-argentina-s-currency-exchange...
People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.
I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.
It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.
Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).
I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.
Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.
I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.
So don't pay with it in unsafe settings. For them, crypto still can absolutely be a very valid means of saving money. When the local currency is inflationary and the banks restrict dollars, crypto saves the day wrt holdings. Transfer to bank account in local currency as needed.
And you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist. It is never acceptable, and it happens because of relaxed dotards who don't fight or prevent it. As a tourist, being taken advantage in dollars is what I consider scary.
You are suggesting that people should illegally hide their crypto from their government and taxation.
I assume if you live in say Argentina, then you really have little other choice.
But they don't have the knowledge to be safe, even though they strongly understand the need for security. I prefer not to advise other people to perform risky actions.
> you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist
And you should never tell other people what to do.
I am actually pretty okay with being generous and paying "too much". I've traveled to places where I'm relatively a fucking rich bastard. I don't see that I should be a selfish arsehole towards people that earn cents compared to me.
I hate foreign governments ripping me off because I know the money isn't going towards anything useful.
But I attempt to be thoughtfully generous towards individuals.
Although I avoid tipping culture (as a New Zealander it feels prostitutionally sleazy to me).
I remember some Germans telling me I was ruining it for other tourists by not haggling enough. Fuck those tight wankers.
Being generous is completely different from getting scammed. For example, one can be generous by not bargaining it the price is within affluent standards. One can however be scammed by being taken for a useless long taxi ride. The point is to reward the good and prevent the bad. It depends on whether you see yourself as a force for good in this world or not.
Tipping culture is a distortion of what tipping should be. Tipping should be a reward for "unexpectedly extraordinary" service - this by definition is a rare occurrence.
The government doesn't ask me when it prints money to pay the interest on its debt. It applies this inflation tax regardless of how much income tax one pays, which compounds hugely over the years. It is in this way the biggest scammer, and I believe I already declared my lack of support for scammers.
Sounds like we mostly agree.
I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).
If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.
I don't support drug users in my home town either.
Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.
Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.
But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.
But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.
It works to buy darknet drugs, sure. Wake me up when I can go to the grocery store and buy some peaches. "Don't worry, cashier-bro, the transaction will only take 20 minutes to go through, trust me!"
There are so many valid criticisms of crypto, but transaction confirmation time has been solved a long time ago.
It does work for groceries, although not at a physical store, because the store is controlled by government henchmen wrt to their payments. Fwiw, one can trivially by an Amazon gift card using cryptocurrency, using which one can then pay for online groceries.
As for transaction confirmation times, there are cryptocurrencies in common use that confirm nearly immediately. The lack of your knowledge shows.
Nothing stops a physical store from accepting cryptocurrency, unless they need to also make agreements with the payment card networks.
Sure, good plan. I'll just walk into thr local CVS to buy a gift card and... oh, wait, no. Exact same issue.
It is a working means. The gift card is exclusively bought online. It's not usable in store anyway since there is no physical card. There is no issue with online purchases.
The same applies to Russian banks. Russian banks have switched to internal Ministry of Digital Development CA which is not trusted in common browsers.
https://crt.sh/?id=22899279066 (Revoked: privilegeWithdrawn)
It doesn't load for me, but I have read the other comments.
There is the problem of TLS and X.509 being used with centralized authorities like this, even though it is not inherent to TLS nor to X.509 (although they were designed to be used in this way). In some circumstances, you can get a copy of the certificate (which might be self-signed) from somewhere else and then check that it matches in this circumstances. In other circumstances there are other things that can be done (e.g. TOFU, which has a different set of problems, but also has advantages in a different set of circumstances). What the security requirements are will depend on the circumstances, which can also depend on the user's intentions; they should not have to depend on a centralized authority.
(There is the issue that a single X.509 certificate cannot have multiple issuers, though. There is also the issue that X.509 certificates cannot contain unsigned extensions (they could be added after the signature, but an implementation might check for additional fields after the signature and reject a certificate that has any). Although an alternative schema can be made (I have done so), it would not work with the existing protocols.)
I may speak from ignorance, but why do SSL certificates depend on centralized CA?
If I'm an entity such as a bank, I should be able to sign my own certificate and provide the public keys to my clients which then can use it to both encrypt communications and to make sure you are talking with the entity you want to talk to. Am I missing anything?
> provide the public keys to my clients
How does this part happen? How does the client know that the entity providing them with that public key is who they claim to be?
You visit the bank in person and the bank gives you the keys in a flash drive, QR code, printed paper, ... Then you go home and install the keys
So, you're right that this does work in theory, but it obviously doesn't scale, right? We can't have every person physically go to every storefront they want to purchase something from and then drive home with a USB stick. What if I in Minnesota want to buy something from Florida or France?
The role CAs play is to be a trusted identity verifier so we don't have to have millions of people driving around to do key exchanges in person.
That makes sense. The downside is that now if said CA has some interests in whether to re-issue a certificate or not, we have a problem. Imagine that Cloudfare decides you are a bot and doesn't allow you to visit pages. You are going to have a problem because a lot of websites use it
I think the idea of a CA is good but it should be distributed somehow
Yeah, of course. Every solution has pros and cons, you gotta settle on the best one for the world you live in.
CAs are quite distributed already. You probably have a couple dozen or even a hundred different root CAs installed right now, and you can install whatever ones you like if necessary.
People don't really know how to install SSL certs, it's intentionally not easy especially on phones, and it's not clear that what they're installing only affects the bank. But yeah, the industry could make this semi-easy if there were a real need.
How do I know what certificates come with my browser?
You can go look at them. In Firefox, head to "about:certificate" and click the Authorities tab.
You could also install a hypothetical bank certificate that way
they can fetch the key or its hash from DNS. it's not like the current system is that much more involved. current system is basically a third party signed cache of such ownership claims validated based on ability of someone to modify DNS records.
All caches are just functionally useless layers..., so that's that.
How do I know that the DNS record is owned by the entity they are claiming to be? CAs have nothing to do with caching.
You don't know that even with DNS validated certificates. There's no separate "entity" claim other than "anybody with DNS record modification rights for a given domain".
You can give out the same claim over DNS directly without any extra third party involvement in the form of CA.
Huh, wow. I kind of thought the whole point of CAs was to do identity verification. It they have dropped that entirely, what is the point?
DNS can be trivially MITM'd as well, it's certainly not a secure mechanism for distributing keys.
You just taken down the whole business of dns validated CA issued certificates. Go claim your bounty. :)
I think it would be a good idea. TLS and X.509 would work better that way. Actually, both sides should have a certificate (the bank might issue a certificate to the customer).
It won't do for all circumstances (as some other comments mention), but when it is possible, it would be a good idea.
So you're OK with your bank website being invisible until people visit in person to get the certificates?
SSl certificates for websites probably should be out of scope for sanctions
This seems like a bad idea.
Utterly moronic. We support the freedom of the Iranian people by forcing them to install a local government root CA in every browser. I mean at this rate they won't even have to buy their monitoring tech from China any more, just an old PC and a late 90s tarball of Squid
What's stopping them from using a CA from any other sphere of influence though?
I feel like not being able to use US CAs is just a cheap excuse to enact what they've wanted for a while. Same in Russia.
I mean, we very clearly do not support the freedom of the Iranian people. We deposed their democratically-elected leader in the 50s in favor of someone more pliable to Western interests, and when they rose up against their current government early in the year we went "Good luck! We're with you all the way!", then stood there when 30,000 of them were massacred. The well-being of ordinary Iranians has never been part of the calculus, so there's not really any actual hypocrisy.
It's not impossible that the US got rid of the last shah too. He had turned against western interests at some point.
Nobody gives a damn about the freedom of the Iranian people. They are a problem for Israel [1], so the US bombs them. The rest is just post-hoc justification.
[1] Note that every civilised country should be a problem for Israel- but Iran is the only one that actually dares opposing it.
These remarks are antisemitic. The people of Iran aren’t seeking a fight against imperialism. We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them. The fascist Shiite regime has taken everyone hostage, and it’s leading us toward a collective suicide.
I don't care what Iran, Iranians, or Israel wants. I'm American. The fact is, Israel somehow pushed our executive branch to start a war over there.
> These remarks are antisemitic
So it would be fine if they were against any other country engaged in genocide, but not against Israel because it's Jewish? Is that your defense of Israel?
> We want to live like ordinary people in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and be allied with them
You want to be allied with a genocidal state and the country that has forced you into poverty for the last decades?
In 2026 in Gaza there were about 1000 deaths - many of them combatants officially mourned by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In the same year:
Iran killed at-least 5000 civilian protesters.
Russia killed around 1,800 Ukrainian civilians.
5000 were killed in Sudan. 3000 in Haiti.
You are fine will all that (or will deny it), because you only care when the Jews are involved.
People don't have memory capacity of mayflies. That's your primary mistaken assumption.
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It's bizarre that there isn't yet a total separation of certificate-and-state.
This seems like a poor choice. Missing the point of sanctions, possible long term negative second order effects.
It's not as if SSL critics warned about this ponzi pyramid, prone to censorship.
petty
One more technical challenge. The whole ssl infrastructure is incompatible with a state current planet moves forward to.
This is super-dumb. The same thing is happening with Russian banks.
Their answer? They're now asking users to install root certs from the Russian ministry of communications. So it can now MITM all the encrypted traffic in Russia.
China and many others run their own CAs, I'd presume Russians could use those if they wanted?
Russians didn't want to use those, until the West made it inevitable.
And why is that?
It's not that hard to find a CA in a more aligned regime.
Rolling your own MITM CA as a replacement just looks like something that was waiting for an excuse.
Violating the OFCOM restrictions will result in losing access to VISA/MC payments. No company wants this.
Dumb for the US: if US were currently MITM with certs copied by its agencies, US won't be able to do that for Iranian / Russian certs.
SSL MITM also requires hijacking the network and redirecting the traffic.
So now that SSL certificates are being weaponized it now becomes a matter of national security for any country to have their own independent CA infra.
Another win for the US.
It already was. Stuxnet used trusted, signed Windows drivers to destroy Iran’s centrifuges back in 2010 and afaik we still don’t know exactly how the attackers did this.
Better yet, don't rely on a central trust authority that can't be trusted.
I mean if you have ever tried to get Code signing certificate, it is absurd theater to get it working and your choice is like 3 different US certificate authorities.
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How could you possibly label the Iranian war so far a genocide?
The word genocide is currently undergoing semantic bleaching (https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-actually-and-ot...). It's too powerful a word for propagandists/activists to resist beating it into oblivion in the service of their causes.
Targeting civilians, hospitals, and food distribution networks is just normal warfare! Israel has a right to defend itself! Their land was promised to us thousands of years ago, and they have no right living on it!
"Time for bridge and powerplant day! A whole civilization dies tonight!"
That’s fair as a very troubling threat. So far it hasn’t materialized. Seems to be the boy who cried wolf.
I think you picked the wrong analogy. The US threatened unjustifiable acts targeting civilian population & infrastructure, and to a degree has followed through - for example bombing water facilities: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/us-bombs-iran-w...
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Trump Vance Johnson Elon and Thiel are removing US institutions globally by force
Trump is intentionally playing into Chinese, Russian Noth Korean, Iranian hands
They must be impeached/removed regardless of intent
Nobody voted for this
Good.