The US flexes a lot of political muscle to enforce copyright restrictions, maintain secrets, and expand surveillance around the world. That may not be as oppressive as China, but on a scale from "free" to "China", it's still in the "China" half.
Yes, in terms of implementing secrets & National Security-related spying there is overall parity, with the US probably a bit ahead of China & Russia.
But in terms of being an average citizen, it is night and day. At least for now, the US is an active open democracy, with a large majority of citizens actively engaged in maintaining the governmental and extra-governmental institutions the maintain democracy, e.g., independent judiciary, co-equal branches of govt, elections, independent journalism, free speech, etc. Even though these are imperfectly implemented and under threat by the current administration (w/increasing evidence of significant compromise by Russia), the US remains overly in the OPEN and FREE column.
In contrast, China is a straight-up autocracy, and it is openly working to ensure it's citizens do not even know their own history (e.g., Tiananmen, Tibet) or current news (e.g., Uyghurs), and have no capability to independently either obtain accurate information, or to organize to respond appropriately if they can somehow get it. And of course the spyware topic of this article, where ordinary citizens can get stopped on the street for failure to install.
This is little different than "May I see your papers please".
Russia is not far behind.
To falsely equate these regimes and their surveillance & interference levels is tantamount to propaganda.
The current administration is providing one of the greatest demonstrations in US history of just how different the US is from the Russias and Chinas of the world.
Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of press, is working well given the intensity of the atmosphere in question.
There are routine demonstrations against the administration all over the country, they're not being broken up by thousands of government thugs with clubs and guns, which is what you see in Russia, China and Iran.
A solid 90% of all media is entirely stacked against the administration. Celebrities are openly calling for the President to be coup'd, killed, or otherwise just 'taken out.' Even the media has joined in on that at times. The so called deep state (a collection of entrenched, powerful bureaucracies within the government) have been openly acting against the administration at every turn. And come the post mid-terms - which clearly the Democrats are going to retake the house in - there are going to be approximately a thousand investigations.
Despite the cynics proclamations, and the current cultural insanity (we've seen it before, the late 1960s and 1970s were far worse), the US system is functioning amazingly well. The current administration has accomplished almost nothing of what it would like to do, and will be a lame duck in a few months. In 2 or 6 years, there will be another administration, and that's that. Life will go on, just as it did after LBJ, Nixon or Bush.
There's nothing even remotely comparable to this in Russia or China, and there never has been.
No, it's not. The leading dedicated TV news network with about 45% of they audience of that media form is completely and unabashedly cheerleading for the Administration, and not even trying to pretend otherwise, as are major outlets in every other form of media. The idea that 90% of the media is hostile to, or even just not overtly shilling for, the Administration would be amusing if it didn't derive directly from the persecution-complex reinforcing propaganda those same media shills use to keep people locked into their propaganda bubble.
"News Coverage Of Trump More Negative Than For Other Presidents"
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage...
MSNBC, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, all talk-show hosts, nearly all journalists (roughly 9 out of 10 vote Democrat to begin with), nearly all celebrities, essentially all of Hollywood - these groups are all as close to universally against Trump as you can get. It's not subtle, it's nearly all-encompassing. Estimating that 90% of media is stacked against the Trump Administration is an understatement.
The reasonable people who make that argument are also the important vocal watchdogs who provide the friction against further abuses of power. They shouldn't be casually dismissed just because there are worse governments in the world.
It is a wholesale difference in kind/type.
NatSec ops constrained by a robust constitution implemented by an elected govt, with different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning -- one of the principles on which is was founded (see 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Ammendments for starters), and a vigorous tradition of free speech and free press is one side.
The other is an unelected totalitarian govt with a tradition of actively murdering it's own citizens to consolidate single-party political power, decades (China) or centuries (Russia) of manipulating information to the people, zero free press with active suppression, and active programs in both the civilian and military heirarchy to restrict information and spy on the people.
To even remotely equate these systems and the threat they pose to the people is to either 1) deliberately grossly misrepresent the situation, or 2) display profound ignorance of the issues.
If you want to recognize that there is a vast difference of type and then go on to discuss how the US might be better about what they do, that can be a fine discussion. But the land of 'they're all the same just different degree' is so far from reality as to render discussion useless.
When I think of the FISA court I don’t exactly think of “different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning”. The FISA court is literally a non-adversarial court.
I think the US court system is one of the best designed in the world. But please don’t pretend that the well-developed standard court system is anything like the secret and unaccountable national security court system.
You might notice that you're already off in the weeds of international National Security issues and nowhere near the problems of what Russia, China, Iran, etc. are doing. So our system is already fundamentally different.
Then, you might notice that you are completely erroneous about FISA accountability. It is accountable to both higher judges and to Congress -- see the original authorizing act and H.R.2586 in the 113th congress on increasing FISA accountability.
Yes, the FISA courts which deal with national security level secrets are different from open courts, and the accountability has been lax. But if there is any "pretending" here, it is that somehow because FISA courts exist, we're somehow on the same plane as totalitarian and criminal states.
For starters, the FISA courts EXISTS, and does turn down requests. Here, there EXISTS a court system requiring evidence, arguments, and warrants.
It may be imperfect, but there is no such structure whatsoever in Russia, China, Iran etc. -- if they want to spy on someone, foreign or domestic, they just do it.
Again, there's a basis for discussion of how the US, EU, and FVEY countries could do it better.
But there is no basis for discussion with a simplistic and/or propagandistic false equivalence of the open liberal democratic countries and totalitarian regimes.
No, it doesn't. It means that people who think the US (or the West or whatever) is somehow uniquely evil have an incorrect view of the world and will have incorrect actions in the future as a result. That the US is screwing up doesn't mean that other places aren't screwing up worse. It also means that it isn't only the US screwing up, so if you start arranging your protests and rhetoric and such based on that theory you're going to get played by people who will quite happily play the part of "good guy" for you right up until they close the trap. It also means you may miss allies in the fight, like this guy. There is no way in which incorrectly thinking that the US is the worst or uniquely bad is a good idea.
I believe the US is worse than the HN gestalt thinks it is... but China is absolutely worse. It's a preview of where we're headed if we allow people to convince that we are obligated to hand more and more control over to the government to solve every last possible problem, up to and including hurt feelings.
Not “uniquely evil.” I think if he’d said what you’re shifting the goalposts to, it would have been an unremarkable comment with few if any replies. He didn’t say that though, and what he did say was very clear and didn’t leave wiggle room for the hyperbole you’re trying to inject.
The actual quote the person you’re responding to was addressing justifies what they said, insofar as it ...trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet". That’s a fair summation of using China as a diversion when people claim that the US is *...An oppressive presence on the internet.” Responding to people who claim that it’s worse than China, or “uniquely evil” is an entirely different conversation no one here was having.
Consider also the bigger picture. There is no rule of law in China. That guy who is being forced to install spyware on his phone is probably in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands (and maybe over a million) people have been detained without charge and on no legal basis. Conviction rates are extremely high because trials aren't fair. Lawyers and activists disappear. Torture and forced confessions are common.
This is the one sentence that everyone on HN must remember when we get into debates about who is better/worse/trump/xi/etc.
In China, you have no rights. There is no recourse. There are no promises made by the state to protect you. This is because of China’s situation where it needs a strong central state to maintain control of the distant provinces and keep from fragmenting, but that is another debate in and of itself.
The US has screwed up horribly many times, for sure, and is not perfect. But here and in many other countries you are innocent until proven guilty and have the ability to take the state to court to fight a decision you disagree with or feel is unfair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license
It's always sad on the Let's Encrypt forum when someone fails to get a cert and the reason turns out to be that the hosting provider has blocked all inbound HTTP connections because the user's web site wasn't licensed. This is a regular event, most recently reported this past weekend.
The concern is the western countries taking actions to become more like China rather than less like China. It's natural to worry about convergence because eventually these things just become run away systems that are too entrenched to change.
Think about how we used to differentiate ourselves from the totalitarian regimes of the world in the post war communist fighting era. This pool of attributes is shrinking. Indefinite imprisonment without trail, national security letters, labelling the media as traitors, labelling companies that enable encryption as traitors, an omnipresent eavesdropping apparatus, etc...
The challenge of filing presidential candidate paperwork in the US versus the challenges of having a contrarian political opinion in China are nowhere near each other in level of hardship.
Moreover it does nothing to dispel concerns held by people who feel the US is an oppressive force online. They might for example, point out that while China oppresses their own citizens, the US has more of a global impact as a result of their foreign policy and massive corporations. If they then pointed out that you’re essentially comparing apples and oranges, and asked you why you thought that was an appropriate response to their concerns, you would say...?
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=aus...
The counterpoint to your claim of whataboutism is that it is possible to simultaneously denounce both the Chinese government's activities and the US, while at the same time critically and rationally examining their differences in methodology. And documenting where they are the same (NSA/CIA hoards zero-days, Chinese intelligence does the same, etc).
Doing something bad openly is better than doing it, but trying to hide the fact that you do it, while pretending in public to be innocent or worse, encouraging condemnation of others who do the same thing openly.
In a country where rule by law is more prominent than rule of law, this shouldn’t be weird.
Lets look at what the linked post claims:
> It basically sends the IMEI and other phone metadata
Google services do this to some degree. Location data, everything. And isn't the IMEI broadcast by the baseband itself?
> as well as file hashes, to a server
Google checksums and uploads files on both mobile and PC as part of their supposed malware heuristics and prevention.
> It also monitors messages sent via otherwise secure apps
This is somewhat malicious, and I'm honestly not sure to what degree Google services are able to intercept or "monitor" app communications.
> I don't know whether it includes sophisticated anti-tempering features or not
Google services certainly do, so much so that projects like MicroG require "signature spoofing" to function. Indirectly, Google has replaced open frameworks with proprietary ones, increasing the reliance of userspace Android on Google services. Google does not want you having freedom and tampering in any way with their ecosystem.
To my mind, the state of consumer technology in the West, and the more aggressive measures like China is taking, are two sides of the same coin. But somehow one fosters complacency despite being just as invasive.
The difference between what a private sector corporation in the US can do to you, and what the Chinese Government can do to you in China, could hardly be greater. It's an absurdity to pretend they're comparable things.
Of course Western surveillance on the Internet cannot be even remotely compared to what happens in China.
The entire population of Xinjiang is 23 million, you're several orders of magnitude off there.