Agreed. To those arguing "the Chinese having all my information is better than the Americans," three points:
1. As 3pt14159 says [1], just because the Chinese have access to your phone doesn't make it safer against American law enforcement.
2. Every phone isn't made by American or Chinese firms. Don't force a false dichotomy.
3. Economic espionage is a scary threat model. Consider what you know that someone else might find valuable. Few people answer "yes" in respect of political information. Many more answer "yes" in respect of commercial information. That is your blackmail value. Choosing to expand your security cross-section to foreign economic espionage plus domestic political espionage, versus simply the latter, is irrational.
The argument is that being exposed to any peeping tom is bad, no matter who it is.
If no one can't prove to me that there are no peeping toms at all, then a hotel room with a peep hole is still a shitty hotel. But as second class citizens, for all of us, choosing a room with a peep hole is compulsory. Gee, who's fault is that?
Sorry. If I have to sleep in a room with a peep hole, it really doesn't matter much to me who does the heavy breathing on the other side of the wall. I'm supposed to pretend it's not there anyway, and so I shall.
Can the Chinese arrest me and throw me in jail? No. But, for sure, I could get thrown in jail, based on the contents of an electronic device. Are the people who conspire to imprison me friends? Wait, what are they peeping on us for?
This is not the argument I refute. I specifically state what I am refuting: "the Chinese having all my information is better than the Americans." Two things being bad doesn't make them equally bad.
Buying a Huawei phone to safeguard against the NSA is akin to leaving one's door open so there is no peephole for peeping Tom to look through. Yes, within a narrow construction, one is correct. But practically speaking, now both the peeping Tom and the person who opened the door can see in.
RE: commercial information
Can you suggest any good books on what kind of information a "pragmatic" first world government might collect on citizens for blackmail?
I'm having a hard time thinking of examples aside from say sexual taboos or things that people find shameful for diverse personal social reasons (e.g. eating habits, media habits and so on).
When a citizen isn't engaged in explicitly illegal behavior is it really that easy to threaten someone's life/career in exchange for commercial/political information? The types of social/taboo espionage I mentioned above don't seem broadly applicable enough for a government to really bother with it as a generic model for blackmail.
I'm not really saying that to be dismissive but it seems like a shared culture on this site since the fallout of Snowden (right or wrong, I'm just describing how I see things play out here).
HN seems to lean more towards the conception of reality where we're playing 9-Dimensional chess vs "attribute things to ignorance not malice."
Take your account for example. Your username doesn't obviously connect you to a real person, you don't have details in your profile, your submission history is a single article of the NYT but then again, your comment history seems real / thoughtful so you're probably a real person operating a single HN account, but when a whole topic is flooded with the same type of thinking and mostly from accounts that haven't been around that long I get a little suspicious. Of course I'm never bothered enough to put in the work to figuring it out.
People with deviant opinions value anonymity. People who have to live and work in the US don't want to be associated with anti-US opinions for pragmatic reasons.
This is one of the most frequented social media sites for tech people. This place is a perfect target for foreign bots.
Between the likes of "Iraq WMDs" or "FISA memo", I don't think I'm going to trust anything the U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence community says, thank you very much.
Everyone I disagree with is a "foreign bot". I swear this is the new form of American elitism. The fact that the leftists of the coastal regions apply this kind of thinking to even their countrymen only proves my point further.