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Comment by dnomad | Hacker News Reader

You will never see Western journalists go after their own surveillance state even though it is far more extensive and aggressive than China. What's really strange is they accuse China of doing things like exporting compromised telcom equipment -- things that we now know that the NSA actually does. (See eg NSA interception of outbound Cisco routers.) Given this very particular blindspot you really do have to wonder who they think they're fooling.

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>> You will never see Western journalists go after their own surveillance state

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.

No we only know about it because Snowden blew up his life to reveal it. That should give you a hint about how this works. China is remarkably transparent about their efforts. The government literally holds classes to explain the social credit system. In the US these efforts are buried for years until somebody risks everything to expose them.

> You will never see Western journalists go after their own surveillance state...

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.

Nobody outside of the American fantasy believes this even for a second. In the US you have local law enforcement running around with cell trackers, public and private organizations deploying widespread facial tracking, and let's not even get to the absolute zero data protections Americans enjoy so literally all their data, from location history to purchase history, is available to the highest bidder. But hey, it's not the government doing the tracking so it doesn't matter! Anybody with even half a brain understands that Americans are the most surveiled people on the planet. (Though the Brits are a close second and it's not for lack of trying they're just less competent.)

But really keep focusing on China. Have a feeling this strategy will work great for you.

> It's less aggressive than China in terms of being used to control the lives of the entire population of the country, though.

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 do see Western journalists go after it, but only from fringe pinko rags, like The Guardian, or The Intercept.

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!)

https://www.cloudwards.net/prism-snowden-and-government-surv... The Snowden revelations about Prism seem almost quaint these days...

The revelations about PRISM are quaint, because PRISM was a web form that let NSA employees send requests for user data to the major tech firms.

Of all the NSA revelations, it was the least controversial one. It was a glorified fax machine.

That really isn’t true at all. It’s just when the USA or whatever country is gone after, it doesn’t make sense bringing up China as a what aboutism.

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