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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

This is not new, and is not unique to China. Any country with intelligence units, like the US, is using data mining to identify and control their citizens. It has become fashionable lately to imply that China is the only country doing these things, or somehow doing it in larger scale. Has everyone forgotten what Snowden revealed?

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I dont remember anything in the snowden docs about the NSA trying to track the movement of all american citizens.

Comparing what the NSA does to what China does is like comparing the treatment of women in the US and Saudi Arabia

Of course, Snowden was only able to review what he saw 5 years ago or more. Why you have any doubts that the NSA, with ample resources to track and control, would use techniques similar to what the Chinese do? Do we really need another Snowden to realize this obvious fact?

> Of course, Snowden was only able to review what he saw 5 years ago or more. Why you have any doubts that the NSA, with ample resources to track and control, would use techniques similar to what the Chinese do? Do we really need another Snowden to realize this obvious fact?

Why do you have so much certainty? What evidence can you provide that they use or currently plan to use these techniques domestically for widespread tracking?

Because while sure they may be working on any sinister form of control possible, the NSA has to do it in secret, which makes it a bit harder to trample on rights. In China it isn't secret, its just the way things are.

Are you familiar with Total Information Awareness?

I think it is safe to assume that every country deploying networks of surveillance cameras and infrastructures for tracking communications won't limit its use to counter terrorism or other "good" purposes. Why? Because they can, and because the first thing any powers that be do once they get the captains chair is to secure their position, and surveillance is an extremely powerful tool to get that goal. It may seem excessive and paranoid, but again I would be surprised if they didn't.

I think it's even more fashionable when there's criticism of any other country to respond with "whatabout the US".

No matter it's many faults the US is still a democracy with checks and balances.

A) the US is not a democracy: see the senate.

B) this is not an excuse for the consistent course towards militaristic, authoritarian state fueled by fear.

It’s controversial because China does not have an independent judiciary or any real civil rights protections, so the potential for and likelihood of abuse is much higher. See also the concentration camps containing over 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang province [0].

EDIT: Sourced claim.

[0] https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-e...

China is doing it at MUCH larger scale and a lot more intrusive. Everything on the internet is tracked and filtered, cameras everywhere. Chinese government can pinpoint location of any of it's 1.3 bln citizens.

Sorry, but it looks like China is just playing catch up on this. The US intelligence already has information on pretty much every American, their social networks, phone calls, consumer habits, etc. And through Facebook, Google and others, they also have information about mosts people around the world. Even if China is able to track everyone inside Chine they're still at a disadvantage compared to the US covert operations.

The whataboutism is strong with this one. Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful. Or abused. But useful.

They're not making a value statement, it's a capabilities statement.

> Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-friends/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-friends/ffgfcbf...

Do you have evidence to back up any of that?

China doesn't have near the surveillance infrastructure that the US government does outside of China.

The simple fact that China has more citizens to surveil does not mean China is conducting surveillance on a larger scale.

The parent article starts with "China is home to the world’s largest network of CCTV cameras — more than 170 million...", so apparently they really are conducting surveillance on the largest scale.

I don't think the number of CCTV cameras is the only relevant metric...

I do. Cops don't have this tech.

Chinese government can kill any citizens anytime they want. If Snowden is born in China, his parents and relatives will be used as hostage or sent into jail.

I think it's important to remember that the Snowden leaks occurred shortly before the "Big Data" craze went into full swing. Even Snowden said at the time that their was more data than could be effectively analyzed.

While I agree with what you're saying, it makes sense that we'd be getting this information only just now - after there has been enough time for 1) data scientists and the like to become prevalent/cheap enough for government contracting and 2) enough time to build working applications on top of all that data.

Yea, china is in a different league. You are talking about 400M video cameras. The only thing close are the self driving car companies, who will be selling info the feds :)

Also the specific concept of gait analysis[0] has been around for decades. Changing one's gait has been an important piece of the tradecraft tool box for a long time now[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis [1]: https://youtu.be/JASUsVY5YJ8?t=278

Nobody is denying that other countries do it too

Don't even pretend that the US and the China use this tech the same way. The US might have a few bad apples in intelligence using data mining for bad things and there have been some questionable data being mined; but suppression of people isn't happening from it. China is using this tracking to actively suppress their people and view that do not align with the state.

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