These Chinese surveillance state stories are all really tame compared to the abuses of the American program.
You are wrong.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
> “When I learned about signature strikes, that was incredible,” Faisal says. “If the criteria is being armed or having a beard – that is everyone in Yemen.”
1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
Chinese concentration camps and black jails are at the level of WWII era horrors. They disappear people around the world just by sending made up arrest request and taking them to China.
Drone assassination program, kills based off metadata score.
Global rendition and torture program. Largest prison population on the planet, exhibiting UN criticized torture, forced sterilization.
China:
Has no drone assassination program. Does not kill based off metadata score.
National rendition program.
Tortures, disappears, organ harvest, forced rendition from foreign countries based on mass and metadata in thousands or tens of thousands peer year (ethnicity, gender, number of foreign phone calls, or family members outside country). People in concentration camps are executed "on demand" in order to provide organs to recipients.
But at least your argument has a strong thesis.
The Chinese program is about homeland security and domestic stability.
I am completely and entirely correct.
The Guardian and The Intercept both did exactly that (which is why you know about the Cisco/NSA thing by the way). I believe French and German newspapers also did something similar.
False. You see it all the time.
> ... even though it is far more extensive and aggressive than China.
Not sure I buy that, either. The US may be more aggressive in terms of information collected, and in terms of global scope. It's less aggressive than China in terms of being used to control the lives of the entire population of the country, though.
But really keep focusing on China. Have a feeling this strategy will work great for you.
I'm not sure that's true.
NSA and other US domestic surveillance capabilities feed the information it gathers passively (they call it "strategic listening") for DoD to understand how to influence entire countries, continents, world opinion.
For example, DARPA has a current program called SMISC: "Social Media in Strategic Communication" - where they are studying next generation technologies for determining how information and opinions spread by social media for US intelligence and military botnets and troll armies to influence opinions at scale. This is just a small evolution over the information domination US intelligence and security has applied domestically and globally for decades.
You'll never see Fox News or MSNBC take it seriously (Except when it touches identity politics, like gun registries. Then, all of a sudden, it's a huge issue! Imagine, the government having a record of all gun owners!)
Of all the NSA revelations, it was the least controversial one. It was a glorified fax machine.