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Comment by itissid | Hacker News Reader

My friend from China explained to me that the surveillance of people is as much top down as much as its bottom up.

- At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor.

- At the city level they have more ways to collect information about people like companies feeding data bases, people interacting with the internet and retail.

He explained that the idea is even if 10% of the population is brain washed they can keep tabs on the 90% and when shit hits the fan they want to be in the know. After Tiananmen they have followed a formula: Keep enough people happy and conforming with economic prosperity and get ahead of the curb for restive remainder.

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China also tolerates civil unrest and civil disobedience as long as it's not directly challenging the authority of central government. Official name for it is "mass incidents" or "mass frustration".

There are almost 200,000 of these incidents every year. Several of them grow into large demonstrations with barricades, sit-ins, and rioting. They are usually reactions against come companies, local government, land seizures, or some corrupt individuals.

As long as people don't demand changing of the system, government often gives in at least a little. People can be changed, more investigations, some government actions can be cancelled.

It's clever way to bend without breaking. Allow people to show their frustration against things that are wrong but control tightly what kind of targets are allowed.

China could probably go much further. In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you). Much of that surveillance is automatic, and fed into police threat scores and FBI databases based off of online conversations (like this one) and other information (including financials, purchase history, social circle, etc).

Now, in the United States, if you want to disrupt some other kind of corruption (say, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists, and the FBI will infiltrate and seek the arrests of that behavior as well, enforcing the strict relationship that wealthy families have in the enforcement of American societal structure.

This is a false equivalence. Your second paragraph is just conspiracy theory. "It's all same" is cynical and unintelligent attitude.

I'm so absolutely tired of people dismissing very real concerns and positions of people with the term "conspiracy theory"! First of all, gp isn't wrong, those things do happen in America and we have had plenty of proof leak over the years to back that up. Second, the entire history of the world is chock-full of conspiracy, so to dismiss points so blithely and naively as " conspiracy theory" indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Third, has everyone just forgotten that the term itself was pushed post JFK assassination as a psyop tool by the CIA to discredit anyone who questioned the Warren commission?

If it weren't for Snowden many of us who had been ranting about the NSA would still be getting dismissed with off-hand remarks of "conspiracy theorist" with a condescending undertone. Yet even as those of us warning about these issues move on to tell people about the next thing, we get the same thing. Even worse, after being proved right by Wikileaks or Snowden etc, those same people are still making excuses for their failure to heed those warnings. For example, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to start talking about NSA and to get "yeah we'll, we knew about echelon, it wasn't a surprise" type comments. Yes, those of us paying attention knew, but the problem is that we all got dismissed by smugly idiotic people with phrases like "crackpot conspiracy theorist"...

"Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument. I'm aware that they happen and I'm worried.

They just don't happen in the same scale and they don't have as bad consequences for people.

There is a huge difference between "that's not true, it's a conspiracy theory", and "oh sure it does happen, but at a different scale and with less bad consequences [not that I would want to suffer the worst consequences in either scenario]".

> "Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument.

To "that's a conspiracy theory" it actually is, and though I still agree that it's a red herring to talk about the US when China is brought up (and China or Russia or human nature when the US is brought up), it's not a "conspiracy theory" at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...

> It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.

> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

You said none of that in your original argument.

False equivalence AND conspiracy theory? Lol.

In order...

"False equivalence": Nope, not saying they are equivalent.

"Conspiracy theory": Nope, read the reporting on the Snowden documents, fusion centers, legal cases involving use of surveillance, statements by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's all the same": I think what America is doing is both worse and of a different kind.

> In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you)

Have you tried? Did you know that the United States communist party has been in existence for a century? [0]

> (says, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists

I'm not aware PETA is on terrorist watchlist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA

I mean, the communist party was outlawed in the US in 1954, so probably not the best example.

The thing with informants is they can lie. They can pretend the loyalists are dissenters and the dissenters are loyalists. They can tell stories just because they personally don't like someone. They can demand protection money. It's vastly more fragile and unreliable than a system based on technology.

Sure the engineers can make the system lie. And they probably will to some extent. But it's a much smaller number of people you need to keep pleased and policed.

The formula of appealing to a small base which keeps you in power through cronyism is the formula for power. It’s true in every place you find political and financial power, from Beijing to small-town USA, to corporate boardrooms around the world, and tinpot dictators around the world.

You might enjoy reading The Dictator’s Handbook.

How is that different from people working for FB Or Google?

It's same there, a few of them are financially rewarded for pushing privacy evanding tactics and others silently follow otherwise risk being reported.

Except Facebook and Google aren't operating mass incarceration camps that target people solely based on ethnic/religious affiliation. The moral dubiousness of working for Google isn't the same as working as an informant for the Chinese secret police.

Facebook does play a pretty direct role in the ongoing Rohingya genocide.

Facebook has paramilitary factions genociding the Rohingya? I'm not denying that Facebook played a role in the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories in Myanmar but to place the blame directly on them is absurd. Facebook is just an ill-moderated medium.

There's more than that. Messenger/Facebook is used in a lot of the third world in place of stuff like SMS and phone calls.

Facebook completely kneecapped the ability of the Rohingya to organize and tell their story by pulling stuff like this at the request of the Burmese government. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-...

EDIT: This whole idea that Facebook's only sin was not moderating enough, and that they didn't give direct support to the government to help the genocide is just their PR and legal departments going into overdrive because they know they screwed up hard.

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