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Comment by shard972 | Hacker News Reader

Why would it be? Seems reasonable to not let low-level chinese employees access to company secrets given their track record.

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Compartmentalization of data, monitoring, vetting of employees, better communication policies (particularly around the risks and monitoring), better management, keeping employees happy who have access to valuable data (financially or otherwise), etc are all things that could be done to address this.

There are plenty of jobs where people get access to high value assets without being high-wage though. It's too simple to reduce it to mere wages.

The part about "it seems to work for them" sounds sarcastic because Apple's problems with leakers have been well publicized.

This seems incredibly racist. There could be low level employees of other ethnicities or countries of origin leaking information. That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

How many Chinese companies are giving Americans access to high level permissions in their computing infrastructure?

If every country has this then China’s is the Lebron James of them.

> That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

No, it absolutely is not. That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government. Companies can, and do, decide not to give certain privileges to remote offices. It is not comparable to businesses refusing to staff certain positions or give certain responsibilities to remote offices. Furthermore, companies can require certain positions to be filled by US citizens (common practice in defense and aerospace companies).

That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government

It is also racist to assert that Muslims are all of a single race. Like most religions there are followers of all ethnicities in all countries.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US citizens is not comparable to the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

Which government did that then?

Apparently it was an actual policy that the current United States administration wanted to implement, but I think it got shot down by the Supreme Court or Congress for being unconstitutional. So I guess the point is that it is a genuine example of a thing that governments might want to do...

Remember that 95% of the stuff on Amazon is manufactured in China. There’s a demand in China for sensitive information that is beneficial to the folks running the factories. Sometimes for commodity products are priced pennies apart —losing a contract can put the factory out of business.

That doesn’t mean that Chinese are inherently more risky. It’s just far more likely than an employee in China is a risk for certain types of corruption than an employee in Munich or Brazil. A warehouse manager in New Jersey might be accepting bribes, but for a different reason and different impact.

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