content: I have a lot of things to say on this subject, and some of it is not directly relevant, but bear with me. Our federal level government seems more concerned with imprisoning and criminalizing the activities of the people. I'm a victim of this, having been unjustly tried (I literally had no knowledge or activity associated with an aforementioned group - judge winked at this) and forced to plea bargain (because I'm destitute). While they're crying up and down about China, they're using most of their budget to hunt their own citizens (The DoJ budget alone is 27.1 billion, prison budgets are in excess if 60 billion, and only $1 billion goes to Federal Public Defenders). In such a massive system of prosecution, they're prosecuting an unknown number of innocent people who never make it to appeals for lack of money. I can assure you, if I so much as had parents to live with, I'd have been screaming it up to the supreme court for the 20+ years it would take me. Unfortunately, I have literally nobody. Regarding budgets of the NSA, CIA, and other "security / information" agencies, they're in excess of 52 billion. From what we gather of the Snowden leaks, a significant portion of this budget is spent spying on us and our allies. Which is the second point: The deliberate intention of most agencies and laws that keep cropping up (like CISA now) is to ensure youth and poor are criminalized for exercising what tiny amount of power they have left. CISA, for example, has two specific paragraphs that basically criminalize any activity that compromises a system in any capacity - making whistleblowing, DDoSing, hacking of any sort, all a federal crime of a "cybersecurity threat". This is not a law to protect. This is a law to criminalize. That is what most of our government has been doing, especially targeting youth and poor, who cannot even use our courts to pursue justice for lack of ability to even get housing if they dare lose their job (my case). There would be no more whistleblowers. There would be no more Anonymous DDoSing against injustice to raise awareness. There would be no more ANYTHING involving computers that citizens use to clearly shout "We don't fucking agree". So we have ourselves three huge problems on this front. First, a government populated by aged ancient people unwilling to take advice of experts in drafting laws. Second, a government specifically targeting (as in FBI coordinating against Occupy) to criminalize formerly legal methods of organized Americans protesting behaviors of our government. Third, they're using China, Russia, Terrorists et al, to push these two agendas and are on the verge of succeeding on all fronts. Increasing public cybersecurity is the opposite of what they want. The ability to legally organize and protest in any capacity using the internet has been repeatedly dragged into federal courts under claims it's a "conspiracy" - and often by dragging in dozens of people literally uninvolved in any capacity. Where we can claim there's some intent of government, I think we can specifically claim our enforcement and intelligence agencies view us as the enemy. Anyone capable of using technology to fish out their corruption is the enemy, and is now a "domestic terrorist". In other words, "Never let a good crisis go to waste". We're now seeing an America with an infinite well-spring of sound-bite crises to justify increasingly authoritarian control of how technology like the internet is used, and that is why there's no move to truly increase security. Perpetual panic is more politically valuable than fixing the problem. In terms of "conspiracies", I think this is the only one we can prove truly exists by design. Perpetual crisis, perpetual curtailing of liberty, and perpetually increasing imprisonment of public dissent on trumped up charges nobody can afford to defend against.