Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?
economist.com
economist.com
0: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
Which particular example are you thinking of?
I actually agree with it a lot by the way. I don't want to be hypocritical about the whole thing. But it seems that the fact that a lot of Uighurs make credible threats of violence, (indeed, are actively involved in ACTUAL mass violence), is often used as an excuse by the Chinese for everything they do. Similarly in the UK, some people make credible threats of violence, and the surveillance state kicks into high gear on everyone. And I'm not just picking on the UK and China, many nations use this excuse.
Look, I'm a "tough on terrorism" kind of guy too. Uighurs blowing things up, fine, crush them. With prejudice. You can't negotiate with terrorists. Period. I get that.
Why a dragnet on your entire population though? The issue is scope creep. It starts out with the UK wanting to find people making terroristic threats, and in 20 years the family court accessible text messages between you and your lover are being entered as evidence in your divorce hearing.
But the perpetrators of Rotherham went to prison; there have been several rigorous investigations into the child protection and police lack of action in the case; people resigned.
Most importantly: no-one has been arrested for trying to investigate Rotherham.
Please give an actual name of someone who faced police action for investigating rotherham.
He interfered with an ongoing criminal trial (putting that trial at risk of collapse) by threatening witnesses and calling the accused, before they had been convicted "muslim paedophiles". He was filming inside the courtroom and intimidating witnesses. He was asked to stop. He didn't stop, and he told police he was going to go to the homes of witnesses.
He was arrested and sentenced for that contempt of court. He was given a suspended sentence and clear instruction not to do it again.
He did it again.
Notice that Yaxley-Lennon has said nothing at all about his EDL colleague who was convicted of sexual offences against children. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/edl-english-defe...
You seem to think that Yaxley-Lennon would be free to speak in the US, but he's been forbidden to travel to the US by the US -- that's why in 2013 he tried to used a false passport to travel. https://news.sky.com/story/edl-leader-lennon-jailed-for-pass...
Here's a barrister's views: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/what-has-happened-...
Here's the sentencing remarks for the first convction (please read all of it. It's short and clear):
https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/committal-for-contempt...
Here's the warning the judge gave to him:
---begin
Would you stand up, please. I take, as I hope has been made very clear by the comments that I have made, a very dim view indeed of your conduct which was in the face of repeated warnings that you should not do that which you did do. I accept what Mr. Kovalevsky tells me about the dangers that you might face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am concerned because a very large part of me thinks so what? you could be put into protective custody. But, my concern is to make sure that this trial keeps on track, and my concern is also to make sure that other courts with other trials in similar situations are kept on track without any danger of repetition of the kind of conduct that we have had visited upon us here. The sentence, therefore, that I pass upon you, taking into account all of those matters that have been placed before me and your admissions entered via Mr. Kovalevsky, is one of three months' imprisonment which will be suspended for a period of 18 months. That will be suspended. There will be no conditions that need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but you should be under no illusions that if you commit any further offence of any kind, and that would include, I would have thought a further contempt of court by similar actions, then that sentence of three months would be activated, and that would be on top of anything else that you were given by any other court. In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much.
Could you elaborate? Most of the people I know in tech are actually on the paranoid side.
The world is built with sadistic bricks. I don't think it is active malice that most people ignore them, I think they just cannot exist properly if they think about each and every one. So most people think about a few, if any. Maybe sometimes they eat a biological egg from a chicken that has twice the floor space of a regular chicken. Or they drink some fair trade coffee that was ostensibly not produced with modern slave labour.
It would be different if people had the self awareness to admit it and that they were ok with it. But it’s either cowardly (afraid of peers’ reactions) or somewhat delusional.
I wince to express this, but I’m at least happy to be living in America. For all its flaws, it feels like the founders really did see this type of situation coming and did the best they could to give us some tools to defend against it. Other places have fewer.
Still, those tools seem to be eroding with time.
I'd like to argue that this even leads to us caring less about it than we should. In the west we are so convinced that our political systems are far superior, so that our governments can't do any evil, and if theyd try, someone would take care of stopping them. Only that I have my doubts about that really happening. The favorite way Americans like to do this is playing the "freedom of speech" card, but I guess other countries have equivalents.
The argument goes like this: any student of war will tell you that the most important factor in warfare is intelligence. Strength is of course a requirement, but it’s secondary. It was why Japan was defeated at Midway, for example — that situation arose only because we knew for a fact what their plans were, thanks to breaking their comms.
In that light, since humans seem no different from a hundred years ago till now, it seems rather better to be top dog than to be someone else’s dog. And that makes it my duty to keep my country firmly in that place.
... at least, that’s how I felt growing up. Those feelings have translated more into “we have to be in this for each other, not for governments.” It feels like the Internet is one of the last bastions of true freedom — free from employers, free from identity. You can even make a fortune if you’re sufficiently lucky and talented.
It feels hollow, though. Part of the reason for the feelings I expressed above was that it fulfills a deep primal desire to be a part of something greater than yourself, to be aligned to a common goal, something more than just chasing a paycheck.
I wrote this mainly to give some context about how someone might be ok with the idea of building surveillance software, but feelings are always a complex and multifaceted thing. And we’re all still learning what it means to be human and to contextualize our place in the world. Is this really the best way to spend our time? And yet we’re forced to, if someone else has a club they want to club you with.
One closing point: the best way to change an organization is from the inside. If someone was truly worried about the NSA, joining them seems like one of the most effective things you could do. Because you truly believe it could be a tool of good, rather than a dystopaian weapon. There’s a reason idealists like Snowden were attracted to the job.
I hope this wasn’t too philosophical. Mostly it’s just hard to determine what you should even do with your life. It feels like no matter what you do, there will be people who hate it. So why bother defending your own point of view? Yet that feels like a cheap way out.
The worst are pure mercenaries, who care only about the paycheck.
(But that's still simplifying the problem. Taking a moral stand is also a function of your life circumstances. It's easy to complain about ethical problems when you aren't the sole provider for two households and also facing a huge medical bill. Also, evil people don't write job advertisements for complete turn-key doomsday products. There's a spectrum there - isolated parts may not seem that evil.)
It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
This already seems nearly impossible. As the surveillance state gains strength it becomes more difficult to oppose it and win an election. In legal means, they can fund your opposition well and they can attack you for crimes that could have been prevented. And beyond that, their surveillance is a very strong tool in an election.
"Probably can"? Definitely can and is being used.
These claims seem completely unfounded. It always surprises me when well-known outlets like The Economist just make assertions like this, without having any data to back it up. Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims. Instead they are just parroting this tired old narrative.
> Cops surveil, that's their job
These statements are not equivalent. No one is disputing that cops surveil people. The question is, are they using the same tools that China is? That's what the person you're respnding to thinks the Economist needs to back up.
> Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims.
Moreover, Snowden's powerpoints confirmed eager cooperation from all major US dotcoms, with facebook's early ex-CTO nearing to publicly admitting that NSLs they received were about "get raw DB access" which I assume they still have, and use up to this day.
Enforcement organizations treating their own like they treat normal people is the rare exception to the rule.
There are many lines drawn. The thin blue one just happens to have the most brand recognition among the people on the wrong side of all the lines.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/War-Rise-Military-Internet-Complex/dp...
The problem I see it is one of a divided society. The people who create and operate the laws and the surveillance dragnets do not worry about being subject to them in their fullest.
Politicians will argue for gun control, enact laws that erode our freedoms, half-ass healthcare and approve funding for surveillance dragnets that will be used to make an end run around civil liberties. In the back of their minds they know that they have armed security, that no enforcement agency will risk using those laws to abuse politicians, they don't have to worry about healthcare and they can afford a good lawyer to convince the court that their civil liberties have been violated.
The people and organizations that actually implement these bad things don't rock the boat because when you're on the inside whatever bad thing it is doesn't apply to you. Cops are exempt from gun laws. The three letter agencies don't use secret courts to handle issues with their own personnel and don't send information requests and gag orders to each other. People in the healthcare industry know how all the tricks to play and strings to pull to get themselves good enough coverage at a fair price. The agencies operating the stingrays, using ALPRs to catch people with weed on their way out of states where it's legal, kicking down doors and shooting people's dogs don't have to worry about being subject to it themselves because of the thin blue line. And all these people's salary depend on them not rocking the boat over the fact that they enjoy some perk that is not available to the peasantry at large.
If all the bad authoritarian crap society does was done to everyone with at least a token attempt at being impartial we'd do a hell of a lot less of it.
http://www.telerama.fr/monde/amesys-egyptian-trials-and-trib...
The timing of it on HN smacks of the discussion from last month based on the NYT article that the Chinese government employs people to patrol internet discussion forums and write "America is just as bad!" posts to distract people every time an article comes out that paints China in a negative light.
Of course, most of HN is political propaganda lately, but that's a separate issue.
to be clear, we're still making many arrests and incarcerating far more of our people than anywhere else in the world -- just using criminally exploitative drug policy as our "gotcha" more than technology, for the moment.
the economist sees "echoes" of the police state in the west. i see the same song played in a different key and a less manic tempo.
when independence was our declaration conveyance
it formed a republic with a twist of democracy
power to the people's voice was it's purveyance
today the people blindly march toward oligarchy
as we for free products provide our own surveillance
and I long for the future Just and Loving theocracy
When those in Christ know God fully in unveiled valence.
The surveillance will demand it.
Also I had no idea what was happening in that region. This[2] is from one of the commenters in that thread:
> As someone from Xinjiang and migrated with my family to somewhere else, This is only a small part of the whole oppression and violation of human rights going on in North Western China. Now a days, Uyghurs students are not allowed to speak their mother tongue in schools, fasting during Ramadan is considered "politically incorrect"(let alone praying etc), and you will end up in "re-educational camp"(aka prisons). Uyghur females are forced to marry Chinese mans, as part of CCP's assimilation process, almost one million Uyghurs has been locked up in prisons, EVERY SINGLE successful Uyghur businessmans has been locked up, influencial figures like artists, scholar,, singers has gone into "political re-educational camps" too, many getting their organs harvested, and CCP sell them in the black market. Many healthy teenagers dies after being released from those camps, due to being some essential part of their body organs being harvested. The international community knows very little about everything happening in Xinjiang because Uyghurs don't have an vocal enough exiled leader like Dali Lama, and also because NO media is allowed inside Xinjiang, especially foreign media, if you have friends and family that have interests in Chinese culture or China as a country, I hope you guys can spread the message and things happening in Xinjiang, China, towards Uyghur people. Its comparable to the Holocaust, just done very low profile, I really mean it. It has past the point of making me angry, I just feel extremely depressed when I read things happening back home, and talking about them. Im just glad myself and all my family members are in a safe and free country now. If you wanna learn more, you can visit Radio Free Asia's website, and they have section reporting on Uyghurs.
> Edit: I'm sorry if this is getting political, I by no means saying that this has anything to do with average Chinese citizens and Chinese people, most of Chinese people I've seen and work with are all very humble really nice people, I'm only speaking out towards Chinese Communist Party, and please don't get too political under the comments,and I just want to give some background information of why CCP installating malware on people's phone is a common phenomenon in China (especially places like Xinjiang). Please be nice to each other, regardless of ethnicity or any differences.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...
without talking about ethnicities that dislike other ethnicities, I can't explain why this photo means that the media won't talk about the Uyger genocide until it's at least well and done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs#/media/File:Uyghur_gir...
Lol. What world does this author live in? I expect to be frisked every time I go to an airport or football game. I expect to have to turn my pockets out every time I cross the US-canada boarder. I'm not a minority, but I assume some who are will want to add to this train of thought re being frisked by cops.
And a warrant to search my home? Warrants are pieces of paper. Cops drive tanks and carry machine guns. Whether they bothered to phone a magistrate for permission before hand is the least of my concerns as they break down my door. Warrants only matter if they are going to charge me with something and want evidence admitted in court. Even then, there are so many exceptions. The evidence gets in. My concern isn't about paperwork, it's that I'll be swatted one night and they will shoot my dog.
Also, the "warrant requirement" is an American construct. It isn't a thing in places like Canada, which most would consider a very liberal democracy. Canadian cops can use evidence even if seized illegally. Nor do they have to stop questioning you if you demand a lawyer. Nor do you get a jury trial. Don't assume that all western democracies use the American legal system.
I've haven't had any neighbours swatted, but I have had friends online targeted. It is something that can haunt you for years.
While Canada's justice system is noticeably different than the US's, it isn't generally worse at protecting the rights of the public. Yes, there are search warrants, and in fact Canada is more protective of an individual's home than the US is. Yes, you have the right to a jury trial for serious crimes. Yes, you have the right to remain silent (though it is somewhat different). Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
>> Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
Look that one up. The US is very big on the exclusionary rule. If evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, it is out. The most famous US criminal cases (think Miranda) involve excluding evidence for such reasons, even if that means an admitted criminal is to be set free. The concept so permeates US legal culture that courts take is as a necessary implication whenever discussing evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Michigan
where everyone involved says the evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, but the evidence is very much in and the defendants are in prison today.
i had no idea that in Canada of all places "cops can use evidence even if seized illegally."
i do know, however, that government censorship of the media is permissible in the UK.
there's no single definition of "democracy" across the world.
it's interesting that some in the US seem to think that, if an individual right is ever modified or restricted in the US, it means we're at "the end of democracy." while, at the same time, these very same rights are routinely restricted in other countries but we still consider those countries to be "democracies."
The US takes an extremely textualist approach to rights. Other countries take more outcome-based approaches rooted in a human rights context, which pretty much post-dates WW2 and the need to avert its atrocities. The UK is kind of stuck in the middle; we don't have a foundational text to focus argument on like the US Constitution, but nor have we faced up to the worst incidents of our past. This makes discussions about what freedom means in the UK frequently degenerate into incoherency as people talk past each other.
Theoretically the UK is a lot less free in some ways; practically you're a lot less likely to be shot by the police, and the justice system maintains a strong focus on fairness. I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's calling it "capability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach - how relevant is a freedom to do something that you're not practically able to achieve in your circumstances?
according to [1], it's not a blanket yes or no. it's a balance of whichever choice would make the justice system look worse. ie. turning someone's home up-side down to find 1g of weed vs a serial murderer getting away with murder because the judge didn't fill out the paperwork properly.
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Canadian_Criminal_Procedure_an...
The perception of rights goes both ways. Canadians sometimes laugh at the US legal system. Canadians see crimes like felony-murder or misdemeanor-manslaughter as ridiculous. So too with the American tradition of supernatural punishment (ie "life plus twenty"). And the duel-sovereign thing, the risk of being tried in state and then again federal court, is very strange outside the US.
The biggest cultural difference has to be the levels of incarceration. As the US increased punishment in recent years, Canada did the opposite. Have a look at their military prison. It is more often than not empty. https://globalnews.ca/news/4097208/military-prison-edmonton-...
This isn't "supernatural punishment". It's sentencing for more than one crime. Life, probably for murder, plus 20 for (say) armed robbery. It's not meaningless to tack on those 20 years. If the murder conviction is overturned, so is the life sentence, but not those 20 years, unless those convictions are also overturned.
Some of these (10,000+ years) read like something from a harry potter novel, not a realworld justice system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentenc...
Life + 20 is a completely different class of sentencing than the ones in the Wikipedia list. I don't see a large distinction between re-sentencing or not. The end result should still be 20 years, no? "Life without parole + $X years" is functionally equivalent to a "whole life order" in the UK.
The extremes in the list are of two classes:
1. Mass murderers, serial murders, or others who have gone on large crime sprees. These generally carry life sentences without parole. So, they cannot be indeterminate no matter how many years are tacked on, unless they have a successful appeal of all convictions that result in life sentences.
2. The indeterminate sentences you're talking about. Generally speaking, these are pretty egregious, violent crimes with many victims or the same victim over a long period of time. In many cases, the convicted could have received a life sentence, or one would have been mandated depending on the crime and the state.
But this isn't common by any stretch, except on TV crime dramas. A problem is the giving of life sentences to nonviolent offenders (e.g. California's three strikes law). Also problematic is the stacking of charges to compel plea bargain, which is exacerbated by cumulative sentencing. But "Life + 20" is just, effectively, a life sentence with a different label.