C.S. Lewis once said.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I was thinking of this as I have been learning more about the XZ backdoor that was discovered on Good Friday. The TLDR of this hack was discovered by accident by a Microsoft dev. If it hadn't been discovered it would have found its way into the most popular Linux distros and affected thousands of servers/workstations world wide. The attackers would have had SSH access to these machines. The attacker/s started this at least two years ago manipulating the maintainer of the XZ Utils project into adding them as a maintainer. They then proceeded to introduce the backdoor. Their approach was quiet clever. This post is not about that though.
What I keep reading and hearing over and over again is that "this is likely a state level actor". The question I don't hear often is why. Why would common criminals NOT do something like this? The answer I believe is in the C.S. Lewis quote. Criminals want money. They are motivated by greed. States are motivated by moral belief of their subjects. If you are a US citizen you might believe the US government is basically trying to do good things. But if you are a Chinese citizen you might have a different view of the US gov. Same goes for Iranians, Russians, Ukrainians, etc. While we all believe criminals are motivated by greed many have a hard time understanding the motivations of state actors.
When there are hacks/attacks if they are state level attacks they are worse. Few people would argue against this. The most government loving security expert would agree that state level attacks are different. They are harder to discover and fix usually. Why? States have more resources than any criminal orgs simply do not have. And if they had these resources I suspect they would use them differently. They also have motivations that common criminals do not have. States want to control their subjects and some like the US and China want to control other states.
One objection I hear when I talk about a stateless future is that criminals would just take over. The assumption is that this would be worse somehow. This example of cyber crime is just one example of why that thinking might be wrong. Most of the arguments against anarchy (no rulers) are simply descriptions of the status quo.
Curious if anyone else has thought about this. It is just interesting to me when people state truths they would normally reject. It reminds me of how art can often teach us lessons about humanity that our ideologies blind us from seeing.