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Comment by zimablue | Hacker News Reader

All the 10,000 arguments about "the US does this". Yeah but the US is a democracy, and criticize it all you like but that means something. It means that Trump is there because the average American (accounting for the broken electoral college, voter suppression etc) wanted him to be. And that there are real limits on his power, and a term limit.

Feels like the critics of western democracies who rightfully want to improve them have forgotten that there is a worse level and a distinction between a capitalistic system that is very rigged and one in which the average guy has absolutely no power and no recourse to injustice. Random NSA people knowing stuff they shouldn't isn't the same as 1984 on machine-learning steroids tracking your every thought.

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I dislike using “democracy” as an excuse to blame the oppressed for their own oppression. Even if democracy is working and there is a strong correlation between policy and the policy preferences of the population (which is a separate but worthwhile debate), it’s simply not an excuse for the government to do oppressive things.

> Random NSA people knowing stuff they shouldn't isn't the same as 1984 on machine-learning steroids tracking your every thought.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese government has some sort of "1984 on machine-learning steroids" type stuff as well, so they might not be as different as you think.

Sorry I haven't written clearly so you've missed what I was saying. I mean that the privacy violations of the US are of a lower order than the industrialised scale of the Chinese, and not just collecting and filtering for terrorist flags but plugging into eg. citizen scores.

You realize that automated credit scores are a thing in the US right? China is taking the concept a step further, but it's not unique to them

US credit scores are subject to many laws, including the length of time that data records can affect scores and processes for disputing data records. Individual businesses have the option of ignoring credit scores, e.g. by charging a premium for high-risk customers, or implementing their own proprietary scoring mechanism tailored to specific markets and risk profiles.

This is a world of difference from opaque centralized scores without due process.

> You realize that automated credit scores are a thing in the US right? China is taking the concept a step further, but it's not unique to them

That's a disingenuous and misleading comparison. Your American credit score isn't going to drop if you criticize the president on twitter, or do investigative journalism that makes a government official look bad.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-blacklist...

That makes a big difference if you're an American citizen, in America.

Outside its own territory, the US has a long history of being far more aggressive than China, so for someone who is outside both the US and China, it's not at all a given that it's better being spied on by the US than China.

Aggressive than China with countries or individuals? Which country would you feel safer taking a vacation in, having insulted the premier in a viral tweet?

Hard to say, but if you have no interest in visiting either, so it's renditions and extraditions that you have to worry about, then ...

I think OP was asking in regard to individuals from anywhere else in the world visiting countries anywhere else in the world besides US (or NATO). The question you could ask is which country would bomb people with drones based on cellphone metadata? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d738aq/us-drones-...

I get the whole point of we at least have the freedom to discuss this but it doesn't work without its hiccups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras#Government_surve...

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