I think if you replace 'hackers' with 'guys' you get the basic definition of government: at some point, a nation picks its 'biggest meanest' (i.e. most capable) guy(s) to protect it and maintain order. Democracy just tries to institutionalize this decision and allow a peaceful reëvaluation every so often.

So maybe GP means he wants a well-designed democracy with a strong military, including infosec. Yeah, good idea.

No.. Government is not about picking a better bully than your neighboring nation and beating them into submission.

What government provides is a practically viable method (kludge?) to reaching consensus on issues where other more reliable methods (like science) fail to do so.

Should "we" build up an army and enslave our neighbor nations or should we rather build up and industry and fabricate something all of them want to have (but can't produce themselves) and sell it to them for horrendous prices? Both alternatives have the same effect, but which one is "better"?

Science can't provide conclusive answers here .. so what do we do instead? In the past we'd ask some designated mastermind deriving his legitimacy from god or a certain bloodline and such. These days we tend to vote on who that mastermind should be or create institutions that allow for more direct control by the nations subjects.

But nothing of this has to do with picking a bigger bully. How big of a meanie you (as a nation) want to be is entirely orthogonal to being a government (or a democracy).

It depends on just who you are attacking. Terrorist groups, criminal organizations or criminal individuals are legitimate targets of a cyber attack, just as they could and should be put under conventional surveillance.

If government agencies attack ordinary citizens or companies, without legitimate authorization, than it's not a problem of means or tools but rather a problem with democratic or judicial oversight on these organizations.

Ok, but you omit a crucial step, that I kinda need an answer to further understand.

In order to attack(successfully), they employeed various techniques; from weakening security systems and protocols, to actively endorse weak crypto schemes. What about these? And for the sake of the argument, let's say that they have the best of intentions and they don't plan to use those against law abiding citizens.

Do you agree with these actions?

Providing these backdoors isn't government hacking on legitimate targets, but rather a sort of lazy surveillance or intrusion on its citizens.

You comment here sort of answers my question above. So basically you don't agree with attacking or weakening crypto/security systems.

The thing is that without those "competitive advantages", I fail to see how they can have an advantage over the bad guys. Playing offense, when the need arises, won't cut it. You're gonna have to "lay the foundations" so to speak, for you to be a successful attacker.

So basically we reach the old, but not so tired, question of how much of your freedom you're willing to sacrifice, for your government to be the "meanest of them all"

Hacking is not the only way to spy on an enemy, especially terrorists or criminals. If such a group is sophisticated enough to evade all but the most sophisticated, ultra-secret bleeding edge attacks, maybe it's time to resort to conventional means. Luckily most such groups aren't. They just began using encryption.

The alternative to offensive hacking is to include backdoors in the encryption technology used by everyone. I think that this is causing more harm than good.

It can be argued that leaving systems vulnerable to attack as the NSA have been accused of doing actually facilitates more crime than it prevents.