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> As an American, I'd rather be spied on by the Chinese than by my own government.

A foreign country can release sensitive information strategically, for example, as a kind of psychological warfare, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)

That or just straight up blackmail you.

Our politicians are grim enough without some dude rocking from the Chinese Ministry of State Security and extorting them into doing something worse than the thing they'd already do anyway*

* if that is possible sometimes.

Or make that data available to your insurance company on a grey market. The phones might be cheap, but the bill will come due eventually.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are probably not important enough to be their target. Unless they could exploit you in order to exploit someone more powerful they care about, like a corporate or political leader. This is more to protect our leaders, which in turn keeps you more protected.

Elections are important and every vote counts.

You are completely missing the point of government surveillance.

Yes, indeed, as an individual nobody cares about you. However you are a part of general census and by spying on you and everyone around you they can predict what you are thinking, what you are craving, what political stance you hold, what are the risks of you being involved in some future problems for them etc. You can go wider and wider to a city, to a state and finally to a country. Then, for example China can really see what american citizens are thinking in general and this is valuable information.

Also, second reason why you are completely missing the point. Let's say you are one of those "I don't care if they spy on me, let them record me on my toilet." - Now your kids are involved in some political activity and you did not pay your taxes for one month 7 years ago. Government wants to suppress your kids political activity and just tell them either they stop or their father (you) go to jail. At least this is how it works in totalitarian countries.

So the government shouldn't be able to record if you paid your taxes or not? That's a very extreme position on privacy.

Or maybe he/she means that the government shouldn't be able to record your kids' political activity? And connect this in a big database to you.

Recording the taxes is fine. Not having paid your taxes for month doesn’t mean you go to jail. But that information might now suddenly be used to coerce your children. That is not okay.

These are great points.

> you are probably not important enough to be their target.

So why are they hoovering it all up? Every last piece of digital dust they can get.

You're not important until you stumble across evidence of a Five Eye nation committing war crimes or try to whistleblow on the IC breaking laws or run for political office trying to limit military budgets or just about anything that goes against the narrative of faceless people in faceless buildings who can and do maintain their power using the tools they have available. When was the last time the Intelligence Community said the world was getting safer and they needed less funding?

Has a single person been prosecuted for the blatant crimes revealed by Edward Snowden? How about MKUltra, did even one person go to trial for the deranged human experiments conducted on American citizens by the American Government?

Everyday people need protection from these lawless organisations more than ever to be able to shine a light on injustices without fear. Society won't advance without it, the Western World world will start spinning it's wheels like authoritarian China and friends where everyone keeps their heads down in passive obedience and liberties go backwards.

You misread the comment. They meant "you are not their [China's] target"

I'm not so sure they did. The idea is that if you are of interest to a powerful adversary, then a second powerful entity that has previously collected pertinent coercive knowledge about you could try to strike a deal using that information they collected, potentially decades ago. Or they could threaten to release the info unless you compromise your positions.

Besides, surely in the future there could be a more automated intelligence brokerage between nations - who knows how long the current political climate lasts before it gets replaced with something more like HFT intelligence trading between the MSS and NSA.

> This is more to protect our leaders, which in turn keeps you more protected.

Nonsense. The leaders on the US are not on my side, why should I be on theirs?

Killing people in foreign wars is done in the name of protecting me, but I didn't ask for that, and I don't believe it protects me. In fact, it's painfully obvious to me that if you kill people in foreign countries, it incentivizes their families to come here and kill Americans. US leaders aren't protecting us.

The fact is, I'm more likely to be shot by an American cop than I am to be affected by China. If I'm going to prioritize personal security, it's going to be against the threats most likely to cause me harm.

I often hear this for argument. But in US, when you don't like what the government is doing, you gets to vote ( OK, might not be working so well but you do have the power )

Which ever nations spying on another nations which you don't have a choice. And that is not just social security, but also national security and business security. The implication is much wider.

> I often hear this for argument. But in US, when you don't like what the government is doing, you gets to vote

No, I don't, and those who do are obviously incompetent at it.

That’s true. Americans need to be more informed about what they are voting on, but that is something we can change. Also, given the Chinese government’s love for internet censorship, it is not without basis to believe that non-Chinese governments will have more censored internet if their internet is relying on Chinese telecom. At least in the current world you can speak freely to spread awareness and enact change even if it is opposing the US government.

Americans, British, well everyone really.

I don't like the government spying on me, I've voted in every election since I was able to vote, worked on some campaigns, and it's done shit all for me. I'm not saying don't vote, but you'll excuse me taking other measures to protect myself from bad actors (which includes the US government).

The fact is, most US citizens are more likely to be shot by a cop than affect in any way negatively by the Chinese government.

> As an American, I'd rather be spied on by the Chinese than by my own government.

Considering the low-quality of security in Chinese products, you are much more susceptible to be spied upon by the Chinese...and the American spy agencies, and Russia spy agencies, and criminal groups, and so on.

> ... you are much more susceptible to be spied upon ...

or indeed by your own employer:

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-moderators-complain...

if we would really be worried about security (and not politics / foreign policy war mongering) we'd be speaking about threat models.. And here the China Supply Chain Threat doesn't hold up. Backdoor hardware implants are only tangentially interesting since the vulnerabilities that stem from shoddy engineering (hello crappy ASN.1 parsers and a thousand other flaws: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1093301841205456896.html) are much cheaper to harness than some hypothetical purpose-made backdoor that costs millions to implement and keep covered-up. (Occam's razor)

China is unable to use Huawei in western countries for mass surveillance without getting instantly caught. That's not the worry here.

What they theoretically could do is to use them to assist in targeted surveillance of small number people, or cause major mobile infrastructure collapse during major conflict.

How would they be instantly caught?

Massive network traffic, extra power use, etc.

because exfiltrating data is hard, and if all of your devices are doing it, it's only a matter of time someone notices. it's not going to be "instant", but the risk/reward ratio isn't good.

I do agree getting that data out unnoticed is tricky. But something remotely activated/deactivated (magic packet) would be trivial. So it's not necessarily all your devices doing it all the time and that could make it very difficult to detect. If that limitation still makes it worth doing depends on what you need to achieve. The reward could be huge.

Yes, but remote activation pretty much means targeted. I am absolutely convinced that there are backdoors in huawei devices, be it intentionally or through carelessness. There's news about backdoors in Cisco products at least once a year - completely accidentally obviously, since we are the good guys.

However, the Chinese would be very careful about using them. Every time you do, you risk getting caught, because just in that moment someone on the target network could be running wireshark to debug some unrelated problem. And once you're caught you're done. You won't risk that to fetch some random HN user's browsing history to blackmail them.

  The Chinese government has fewer ways they can use my data against me

... but are perfectly willing to provide it to everywhere else, maximizing your exposure.

So you'd be fine with being blackmailed with whatever your browsing history is like?

The Chinese government can do MORE because they can do things that would be illegal in America.

That's not to say our government doesn't skirt the law, but it definitely is harder and there can be consequences.

Chinas ultimate business plan: spy on all the Americans and then blackmail them. :-D

> So you'd be fine with being blackmailed with whatever your browsing history is like?

No. But it's much more likely that US bad actors will blackmail me than that Chinese ones will.

The issue isn’t China having “your” information or mine, its them having the aggregate of everyone’s information. Or being able to turn off all the pipes.