Hacker News Reader

Comment by strooper | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to know that the present chips are not backdoored? Or, backdoored by US? Why should the world be concern about Chinese backdoors and not US ones?

View on HN

Put it this way— as Americans, we’re all pretty confident that our government doesn’t pay any substantial number of people to go online and propagandize our human rights abuses under the guise of just being reasonable world citizens.

(Maybe that’s just because we know that right now our government can’t scratch its ass and elbow at the same time, that we won’t face any penalty for our human rights abuses anyway, and there’s no point in paying bureaucrats to do something that ignorant yokels will go out and do for free... but that’s beside the point :)

As a non-american, I am reading this in awe. You obviously believe this is true. I would suggest there is a counterfactual quality here: Maybe you just do it better

I'm not by nature a conspiracy theorist. I don't think the grassy knoll is here. But, I do think that the US government propagandizes inside, and outside all the time and has done so continuously, since the birth of the modern communication era.

You write as if the Vietnam war just didn't happen. That routine abuses by US armed forces in the middle east just didn't happen. As if Snowden just didn't happen.

Maybe I missed the /s in this. Btw, if I got a whack from the site I wouldn't deny this may not be a useful discussion, but I really do mean it: I think this cannot be read, except as a counterfactual non-reality.

> I do think that the US government propagandizes inside, and outside all the time and has done so continuously, since the birth of the modern communication era.

This is a valid point, and one that deserves focused thought. Because it's both very right and very wrong.

The US does generate constant propaganda on most issues of consequence. BUT. The US also generates constant propaganda on multiple sides of every issue.

The propaganda ecosystem is far more robust and distributed in the US. Whether it's straight journalism or spambots, or individuals expressing their heartfelt beliefs.

Maybe that's doing it better? Maybe it's just one mess after another?

One thing I know - it's quite a different from the sort of propaganda you get from a country where the national government maintains a list of forbidden words, events, and attitudes.

You seem to have missed the second paragraph, which tempered the one-sidedness of the first one.

But even then, I think gp is referring to a difference in kind, both in behavior and communication. China's record (present included) on human rights is truly abysmal and incomparable to any nation with individual legal rights.

Propaganda comes in soft forms, which its easy to claim everyone does (I'd agree with that). But there's also propaganda along the lines of "our 'education centers' in Xinjiang are teaching the 'pupils' valuable new job skills!"

Many schools in the USA are indistinguishable from minimum security prisons and detention centers. The only major physical feature that separates them is that schools tend to have larger parking lots and lack guard towers.

Whether you are talking about Xinjiang education centers or compulsory government schools in the USA the excuse for them is going to be along the lines of 'We need to ensure that these people become productive members of society'.

All in all they are compulsory miserable dehumanizing places that are designed to condition and manipulate people into what 'society' demands from them; as defined by the ruling authorities. In both cases anybody attempting to avoid conditioning and years in "detention" is guilty of a criminal act.

My point being that these things are not differences of types, but of degrees. And while it's easy to point fingers and laugh and pride yourself on the superiority of your own country, the take home lesson shouldn't be how much better America is then China, but to use them as a mirror to examine how and why things are better here and how to improve on them.

Reductio ad absurdum. Why don't we say society itself is a miserable dehumanizing construct, the very first layer of expectation foisted upon our free natural selves? A country has borders... what are those but abstract prison walls?

If you are saying elementary schools are reasonably comparable to concentration camps, you have lost the thread of the conversation.

Hand-waving and semantic games don't change the original discussions: who would you rather hold power over you?

1. A democratic government that enshrines human and political rights

2. An authoritarian ethnonationalist oligarchy that enshrines the primacy of the Party

Whoever powers your chips will at least potentially have that power over you. We're in an era where we can decide, but anything can change. Our choices and the values we act on now will set the stage for what is available to us in the future.

Very few Americans demonstrate the level of ignorance displayed by previous poster. In fact the level of paranoia and distrust can be almost palpable.

Things like Vietnam and Snowden are why so many people in our country treat things like gun rigts as a quasi-religion. Fear of the citizenry is one of the few remaining serious checks on government power they believe we have.

However, based on personal experience, only 20-30% of people really realize the level of propaganda we have been subjected to our entire lives. One of the big reasons for this is because USA was the pioneer in government and corporate propaganda. They have been doing it so long and spent so much money on it that it's practically a art form.

In fact I doubt 1 in 10 people every really thought about the fact that the entire economy of the WWW is almost exclusively based on propaganda in the form of advertisements. Public Relations Departments used to be called Propaganda departments before the Nazis came along and turned it into a bad word.

But even then it's not lost on a great deal of Americans that the only people in the past 40 years who have ever gone to jail for war crimes, torturing, and other forms of criminal malfeasance on the Federal level are the ones that exposed it to the public.

Why would we be pretty confident about that? Edward Snowden himself revealed to what depths the US would stoop, and it's got to be a thousand times worse now than what he reported. There are, in my opinion, definitely Americans out there spreading propaganda about the US on taxpayers money. You yourself could very well be one of those people.

Voice of America.

The idea that the US doesn’t covertly spend money on propaganda, when it overtly does and has for decades, is hilarious.

I mean, VoA is actually a pretty good, so this isn’t intended to be criticism of it. However, it is intended as propaganda, although a fairly light version of it.

> Put it this way— as Americans, we’re all pretty confident that our government doesn’t pay any substantial number of people to go online and propagandize our human rights abuses under the guise of just being reasonable world citizens.

You would be desperately wrong in that assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I think the astonishing thing is how incompetent our foreign service is today; even in 1979 the U.S. Embassy had hardly anyone who speaks Persian and got completely blindsided.

In 1954 the US was capable of kneecapping Iran and other countries, but today it is too blinded by an ideology that refuses to accept it is an ideology to do the same.

Surely you're aware that the 1953 coup d'etat overthrowing the democratically elected government in Iran, and installing the Shah in its place, and hence setting the stage for Khomeini later, was orchestrated by a certain country that you mention?

Yes. It may be an evil thing to do but it takes a kind of competence which the us lacks today.

I posit that if the service in question had been _really_ competent, they'd have let sleeping dogs lie and _not_ meddled with other governments. Pretty much the entire world is paying for their incompetence today.

Then again, incompetence is not absolute, and I guess you're lamenting the slide in competence (or the lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) of the service in question.

Because the UK did the heavy lifting and we went along for the ride.

Many people consider IME a backdoor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Right, every (x86) CPU sold since 2008 is already backdoored by the US. Honestly as US citizen who will never go to China, I'd rather be backdoored by China, since they can't throw me in jail, seize all my assets, or generally ruin my life nearly as easily as the US could for breaking some future law.

AMD FX line don't have IME or something similar.

Can you backup that claim?

I found this article that talks about what processor lines have the AMD PSP. https://freundschafter.com/cybersecurity-cpu-and-system-alte...

> After all this research we definitely found the latest AMD CPUs which do not include any PSP functionality. According to a table from CPU World we know now that these CPUs are those we searched for:

Desktop CPUs (Socket FM2):

    AMD A4-6320
    AMD A4-6320B
    AMD A4-7300
    AMD A4 PRO-7300B
    AMD A6-6420B
    AMD A6-6420K
    AMD A8-6600K
    AMD A10-6800B
    AMD A10-6800K
    AMD Athlon X2 370K
    AMD Athlon X4 760K
    AMD FX-670K
    AMD Sempron X2 250

Notebook CPUs (Socket FP2, FS1):

    AMD A4-5150M
    AMD A6-5350M
    AMD A6-5357M
    AMD A8-5550M
    AMD A8-5557M
    AMD A10-5750M
    AMD A10-5757M

x86 and its descendants are a no-go for me because of that. Neither Intel nor AMD are willing to produce x86 chips where the end user has full access to the highest privilege levels.

VISA is pretty interesting too.

Lets not jump into politics! Backdoors are bad and it doesn't matter who does it.

Good to see development from any country. Obviously they have enough reason to do it. Just consider sanctions. They also have to protect their own market.

Anyone that can afford it, should do it. Ultimately it is a good thing from technology prespective.

Anyone who has done even a tiny bit of research into the Chinese government wouldn't need to ask that question.

Here's a preview: https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/22/why-are-people-disappear...

See also what's happening in Hong Kong right now.

> On Aug. 24, Chinese state media announced a proposed change in the Criminal Procedure Law which would allow police to legally detain individuals and hold them incommunicado in secret detention for up to six months without contact with either their families or legal counsel.

Up to six months! That's not bad, considering the fact that some prisoners have been held in Guantanamo for 10 years+ and can be detained there indefinitely without trial and subjected to torture [1].

[1] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/guantanamo-bay-human-rights

The Chinese don't intend this for terrorists who are blowing up rice markets filled with women and children in Iraq, they intend this for journalists and protestors.

Who are allegedly blowing up rice markets filled with women and children in Iraq. Remember, there is no trial.

Also, according to the HRW article:

> The Chinese government is pitching the proposed change as merely an extension of the conditions of the existing practice of residential surveillance, or “soft arrest,” to suspects in state security, terrorism or major corruption cases. “Soft arrest” allows police to confine criminal suspects to their homes for up to six months without trial or due legal process.

Here, read about one of the many people detained and tortured by the United States who turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri

A different Khalid al-Masri is a suspected member of al Qaeda. So they tortured the wrong Khalid. Oops.

This is why basic things like the right to a trial, open court proceedings that journalists can attend, the Geneva convention prohibiting torture, etc etc are so important.

To trust a government to decide guilt in secret is to be ignorant of history.

Enough with the whataboutism. Everybody knows about the dirty business the US gets up to. It doesn't excuse Chinese authoritarianism and human rights abuses.

Have you ever spoken to a Chinese? They have their own good intentions too. Besides that, why do you always trust that our governments’s label of “terrorist” is never self-serving or opportunistic? The civilians we bomb every week might have a different perspective

Or for guys who had an opportunistic neighbor who wanted his land and was willing to "rat him out" to the US forces desperate to capture some bad guys.

Or some poor schmuck whose name was blurted out by some other poor schmuck who thought that reeling off some random names would make the torture stop.

The US does intend it for terrorists, but the US also intended to neutralise "WMDs". So, believing either US or China is crazy.

Scale also matters.

According to your link about one thousand people were sent to Guantanamo. Right now in the region of Xinjiang about 1 million Uyghurs are being held in re-education camps (about 10% of the Uyghur population of the region).

Even if the USA compare terribly to the (rest of?) civilized world regarding human rights, as a non-American and non-Chinese I fear less the US government than the Chinese. (The fact that I'm not from a Middle East country probably helps...)

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/09/china-up-to-o...

America sent all its US citizens of Japanese descent to Manzanar at one time. Many died there. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in Chile on September 11, 1973 leading to the deaths of 11,000+ people. Iranian-Contra, Bay of Pigs, United Fruit Massacre, The School of the Americas ... I mean, America isn't at the same scale because it's 300 million people vs over a billion.

Anyone who's done research would understand China is the one country that has no reason to make the effort of developing a backdoor because it's required that all companies will hand out their data through the front door, and the vast majority of Chinese people seem to be okay with the security vs privacy trade off.

The one country? Come now, dont be so shy: the CLOUD Act of 2018 puts the USA on the same list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Yes see what's happening in Hong Kong. It's a problem of their own making to get rich quick by property, not due to Mainland. Please read this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/22/world/asia/ho...

It will give you true picture of how Hong Kong lost to mainland cities in terms of quality of life and innovation. So economy is the main root of all this frustration and protest. Extradition bill is just the spark.

The people of Hong Kong are capable of caring about their economic situation and their political governance at the same time.

Listening to them, it's pretty clear the extradition bill and the erosion of their human rights is a driving force.

Lived long enough in Hong Kong before 1997 and after 1997 and being a Hong Kong family can understand it from inside/out. So sorry to break your bubble they can not take care of their economic situation without China, it was true before 1997 as it is today. Hong Kong's survival is China, which did not tax it yet like other cities of China with better GDP, but spend on it. Hong Kong got rich when China was closed acting as middle man and earning US$ 5-20k, doing nothing just some paper work on each container shipped from China. Easy money, I was one of such beneficiary.

If you want to talk about human rights, please read through the first instance of re-interpretation by China of Basic law of Hong Kong, when Hong Kong people requested China to re-interpret the basic law against basic Human Rights not to allow mainland spouses to enter Hong Kong. So Hong Kong is still denying the most basic human right of a family, but at that time it was in the interest of Hong Kong people and bad for Chinese spouses, so no protest against it neither any backlash. Indeed overall society was very happy at the cost of infringing human rights. You do something wrong once and open the doors, it will come to bite later. If at that time Hong Kong people would not have involved China for re-interpretation, it would have brought 150,000 people from across the border, along with it some more hardships, but would not have eroded the freedom. Hong Kong people chose prosperity over freedom and now will pay for it.

So fighting for human rights now is just a farce, main reason is, get rich quick does not work, majority live in prison cell size apartment(again by choice) and have no way to change it.

This doesn't answer any of the questions asked.

Let's not pretend the US and China are equally authoritarian please.

Let's not pretend how they are governed internally is what concerns the rest of the world.

The US has been in constant wars, invasions, meddling with foreign politics, running protectorates, etc. for over a century, including having bases all around the world. Far more countries have battle and regime change scars by the US than by China. Including it being the only country that ever dropped atomic bombs (and to civilians, none the less).

And it's not just the Orange Baboon in charge that's worrying (though of course there's that too) -- the "Nobel Peace Price" winner Obama had a worse track record.

(Of course for Americans anything that happened over 20 or 40 years ago is ancient history and the world should have forgotten it and totally trust them now -- still there were like 4 wars and one regime change they assisted in the last 20 years, so there's that).

Such a shame to insult Americans lack of historical context while also seeming to insinuate the world was some sort of idyllic utopia prior to American engagement.

How about we don’t forget that the entire world has pretty much been a gigantic warzone ever since civilization started and how about we remember that American hegemony has been the single most peaceful period of world history.

I’m not even trying to insinuate America should be some great arbiter of what is good and holy, but the fact of the matter is, people have been slaughtering eachother since communities became a thing, and only recently has it become so infrequent that people can go “oh! Look how America fucked up by bombing someone here!”.

As if, without America, there wouldn’t be regional conflicts pretty much everywhere, just like there literally always have been.

>Such a shame to insult Americans lack of historical context while also seeming to insinuate the world was some sort of idyllic utopia prior to American engagement.

The world doesn't have to be an "idyllic utopia" not to want another player meddling on other countries business -- much less a 10000 pound gorilla one...

>How about we don’t forget that the entire world has pretty much been a gigantic warzone ever since civilization started and how about we remember that American hegemony has been the single most peaceful period of world history.

If we forget the Cold war, its proxy hot wars, meddling and support for dictatorships (Iran, Banana republics, Chile, etc) and the associated death toll, and so on. Including a few possible close calls for hundreds of millions (Bay of Pigs for one).

And the relative peace is not because of some protective attribute of "american hegemony" (and e.g. its benevolence), but because the few other major players (basically colonial opressors like UK, France, etc) got burned in the 2 world wars and got off the main game, so no great fights between them anymore...

I think you are both correct. But that only highlights the question about whether we can trust chip manufacturers. I currently tend to say yes, but I would still prefer to buy the American one.

The Europeans are just salty they can’t fuck around with as much of the world as they used to.

Well, I'm of the smaller European countries that were fucked around by those Europeans colonial powers, so there's that...

But if you think it's some badge of honor for your country to "fuck around much of the world", and you think only bitterness for not being able to fuck colonies etc, as much as before is why anyone would oppose it, sure, more power to you...

You seem to forget that Pax Americana is the most peaceful time period in the history of mankind. Is american hegemony perfect? No. but would you prefer a Soviet or Chinese hegemony instead?

All things considered, america has been pretty decent considering it has been the uncontested most powerful force in the world for the past 80 years.

Getting back on the topic of backdooring chips, the US has a strong track-record lately of leaking secrets. You can take some solace in the fact that anything the US would try in that arena has a much higher chance of being leaked compared to authoritarian regimes.

...are you actually trying to say that China is "morally superior" to the USA? Because, without bothering to delve into the tedium of enumerating all the reasons, that is definitely a losing argument.

To rebut your specific two points:

-more countries have battle scars from the USA than North Korea too. It more strongly indicates economic might than disregard for human life - wars cost money. Watch this space.

-Orange Baboon is in large part worrying because of the nonzero chance of making a grab for dictator-for-life. China already has one of those, who happily imprisons rivals and vanishes critics. I'd take Orange Baboon over God-emperor Xi any day.

>...are you actually trying to say that China is "morally superior" to the USA?

Well, counting people they've killed globally, wars they've started, foreign meddling, atomic bombs dropped to other nations, etc, they surely are. Call me when the numbers change..

But who cares for those when it's their side doing them?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-organ-ha...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-us-w...

Yeah, and China does equally disgusting things to its own citizens. Literally right now they are enacting cultural genocide on millions of their own people (see: the uyghurs)

Do you really have faith that China is going to act any differently to outsiders?

>Yeah, and China does equally disgusting things to its own citizens.

Which I'm against, but that's for them to oppose.

Several Eastern and Western European countries had dictatorships, torture, executions, etc, in 20th century as well, didn't see anybody coming from outside to fix things (and don't think their population would welcome an invasion to "fix" things -- like those "democracy bringing" wars in the middle east).

And those pointing the finger at China today, were doing "disgusting things to their own citizens" (Jim Crow? Seggregation till the 70s? western world's worst prison system, 90% titled to blacks + death penalty still in use in 2019?), or were (and are) assisting regimes doing "disgusting things to their own citizens" then and now, so there's some hypocrisy involved too.

>Do you really have faith that China is going to act any differently to outsiders?

No, but there's a player with a known track record on this matters (a bad one) and one that is yet to build one. It's kinda like what Muhammad Ali allegedly said once: “No Viet Cong ever called me n....r”. Sure, they might. But thus far...

Americans imprison more people than China. Americans imprison and torture children at the border.

Prison population's lower when you just execute people and harvest their organs.

And they say Americans don't do propaganda.

>Americans imprison more people than China.

But we have due process and most of these offenses are due to the failed drug war. Whether or not people should be locked up for drug offenses is one thing, but the laws being broken are pretty clear and generally aren't being used as punishment for expressing anti-government sentiment.

>Americans imprison and torture children at the border

This angle is pretty ridiculous. The border facilities are totally overwhelmed by an influx of people who by law are not allowed entry to the U.S. The vast majority are economic migrants, not assylum seekers. Moreover, they made the choice to come here knowing full well the illegality of their actions, and they are not being "imprisoned," they are being detained for a few weeks while the overloaded system processes their claims. Calling it torture is an exaggeration. Also the miserable conditions at the contentious facilities recently in the news are not representative of ICE facilities in general.

>But we have due process

Only when people are not just executed by cops because they dared look too black or homeless or whatever (so many more cases of police killings that any European country when adjusted for population that it's amazing).

And even then, the due process is full of batshit-crazy aspects, from prosecutorial blackmail deals, to "three-strikes" BS.

And let's not even get into prison conditions, use of solitary confinement, rape as "joke", private prisons and prison labor, and so on...

Or the fact that it's the only (or close) western country to still have the death penalty...

And that's for official prisons. Now let's add the various "sites"...

>Only when people are not just executed by cops because they dared look too black or homeless or whatever

These atrocities are an exceedingly tiny minority out of millions of yearly police interactions.

>And even then, the due process is full of batshit-crazy aspects, from prosecutorial blackmail deals, to "three-strikes" BS

The system is not perfect, but the point is that in contrast to authoritarian China, it is generally not abused to suppress political dissent and U.S. citizens have rights to due process and representation in the legal system that do not exist in China.

> not representative of ICE facilities in general.

Save you speech for the children being tortured. Why don't you go down there and say that verbatim to their faces?

Why don't you talk to the parents who are knowingly taking the risk to entry the country illegally?

>Save you speech for the children being tortured

I don't think you know what the word torture means. You've been misled by propaganda. And, again, the problems are happening limited to a select number of overwhelmed facilities.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doctor-compares-conditions-i...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/week-in-patria...

https://www.scarymommy.com/migrant-children-tortured-border-...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/torture-facilities-immigrant-...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/06/usa-family-se...

" The severe mental suffering that officials have intentionally inflicted on these families for coercive purposes, means that these acts meet the definitions of torture under both US and international law,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas Director."

>The alleged conditions documented at the facilities follow a Homeland Security inspector general report that found "dangerous overcrowding" and unsanitary conditions at a different CBP facility in El Paso, Texas, where hundreds more migrants were being housed than the center was designed to hold.

>The El Paso Del Norte Processing Center housed as many as 900 migrant detainees earlier this month despite only having a recommended capacity for 125.

9x over capacity. What exactly are you expecting? The implication that this treatment is intentional is pure political bias. In any case these conditions are not a secret and people continue to voluntarily make the illegal journey. Who is responsible here?

That said, the actual ACLU CBP report was enlightening, detailing abuses going back to 2014 when the CBP program lowered standards during rapid expansion. It's hard to trust other modern news sources like those you provided because of their heavy political slant and propensity for sensationalism.

You're right, 9x over capacity, so it's fine to torture children.

Also, china's full of criminals sentenced to death for heinous crimes, it's fine not to waste their organs.

You're missing the point. No, it isn't "fine" to torture children, but these facilities are hugely overburdened and have procedures to follow. Aside from the corrupt agents who do mistreat migrants, it's hard to ensure humane conditions for detainees when your facilities have nine times more people to process than they're designed to handle. What's the alternative right now, release them into the U.S.?

We need to stop conflating abuses by individual agents with poor conditions caused by underprovisioning of resources due to a general increase/spike in migrant activity.

Also, there is some merit to the idea that poor conditions at these facilities act as a deterrent to voluntary migration. No one is forcing these people to come here illegally and, again, the vast majority are economic migrants, not legitimate asylum seekers.

Let me reword what you said so that I better understand it. Is this what you're saying: "Also, there is some merit to the idea to torture children, these facilities are hugely overburdened and have procedures to follow"

I think that's the gist of your argument, even if it is putting words in your mouth.

>even if it is putting words in your mouth.

Well, at least you admit you're not arguing in good faith. That's not what I'm saying at all. Apparently the involvement of children precludes you from considering this discussion rationally.

That's all we're talking about. You're the one going off topic.

> Literally right now they are enacting cultural genocide on millions of their own people

This is a vast over-exaggeration. I'm always surprised when people believe whatever they read without criticism or scrutiny.

Am I supposed to believe your comment without criticism or scrutiny? Perhaps you'd like to elaborate, instead of just contradicting your parent?

I was waiting for the parent commenter to respond first. I've elaborated below.

https://qz.com/1599393/how-researchers-estimate-1-million-uy...

This is an example of what I mean by lack of scrutiny or criticism. If you look at the study by CHRD [1] cited in the article you’ve linked, you’ll see that their methodology is flawed in many ways. The most worrying part is that this study in particular is the basis of many articles similar to the one you've posted.

What they did was they interviewed eight ethnic Uyghurs from eight different villages in Kashgar Prefecture in Xinjiang (the poorest and most problematic area in terms of violence and extremist ideology). They asked them questions like “how many people do you estimate live in your village” and “how many people do you think were taken from your village”. They then calculated the ratio of people detained to total inhabitants in these eight villages and extrapolated this ratio to the entire Uyghur population in the province of Xinjiang (population 23 million, many parts of which are prosperous and violence-free) in order to obtain the million+ estimate. The 1 million number (or 3 million, it’s hard to keep track of these days) is always thrown around like it’s a confirmed fact, which it decidedly is not.

Furthermore, as the article mentions, CHRD is a group based in Washington, D.C that is almost wholly funded by U.S government grants [2, p.9]. There is a clear conflict of interest here especially in the context of growing rivalry and geopolitical posturing between China and the U.S. The article also mentions Radio Free Asia, an organization literally founded by the CIA [3][4] as an anti-Communist propaganda arm. They claim they are no longer affiliated. Again, another source wholly funded by the U.S government.

[1] https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghu...

[2] https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2015/260/523/2015-26052...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...

Most research in America is funded by U.S. government grants at least partially if not mostly. What's your point? Am I to believe that any research agency that receives US grant money is secretly a propaganda arm of the government?

I don't really know what you expect me or the average layperson to do. I can't get on a plane and go to Xianjing, but I can read and listen to the experiences and stories of the many people that have fled the region and entrust the credibility that (certain) journalists have to do investigative journalism. The source of the article I linked to is one of many.

Also consider that you don't have to be sitting in a detainment camp to be a victim of a cultural genocide.

> Most research in America is funded by U.S. government grants at least partially if not mostly. What's your point?

My point, as I’ve stated earlier, is that there is a conflict of interest here. It's not that much of a stretch to think that the U.S government would like to delegitimize the CCP to further their own geopolitical and strategic interests.

> I don't really know what you expect me or the average layperson to do.

I expect you as a HN reader (but perhaps not the average layperson) to not view news reported in the mass media as infallible, but to scrutinize everything that is said with a high degree of criticality. Whose interests do these stories represent? Who benefits from fomenting mass outrage against an external boogeyman? Who is paying for the experiences and stories which you are consuming and why?

Knowledge of history can be of help here. One example is Rebiya Kadeer’s testimony to the U.S Congress about the Uygher situation [1] which many people accept verbatim. We can see an exact, historical parallel in the form of the Nayirah testimony [2], which was a contributor to the U.S decision to engage in the Gulf War. We all know how that turned out.

> The source of the article I linked to is one of many.

Look at the primary sources. There barely a handful of them which 99% of articles like these trace their journalism back to.

> Also consider that you don't have to be sitting in a detainment camp to be a victim of a cultural genocide.

This is true. I’d like to add that asking Uyghers to speak Mandarin in these “education camps” does not constitute cultural genocide and neither is banning elements of Wahhabi Islam which is not native to their culture in the first place. It’s a simple fact of life that if you want to do business in China or have any kind of economic opportunity, you need to learn Mandarin. This does not preclude the practice of your own native customs or languages. People think China is all Han when in fact there are many, many ethnic groups there [3] practicing their own languages and customs, and getting along just fine.

I'll end by saying that Uyghers are definitely being detained and "re-educated", I've never contested that. I'm merely questioning the scale and characterization of these camps as well as the motivations of some of the mainstream publications.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFWBCPuzl5E

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China

> My point, as I’ve stated earlier, is that there is a conflict of interest here. It's not that much of a stretch to think that the U.S government would like to delegitimize the CCP to further their own geopolitical and strategic interests.

And it's also not a stretch to suggest that a government that defines separatism and religion as two of it's three defined evils is committing cultural genocide on a large (millions+) section of it's country that doesn't conform to the rest of it's society.

> I expect you as a HN reader (but perhaps not the average layperson) to not view news reported in the mass media as infallible, but to scrutinize everything that is said with a high degree of criticality.

There is only so much time in the day, and today I'll spend most of mine scrutinizing the layout of virtual networking devices. In order to receive news and information about topics I am less knowledgeable about I unfortunately must entrust others with the credibility to perform this scrutiny on my behalf. The ones I entrust to do this may fail, but that doesn't mean that I'd necessarily do better than them.

Perhaps my original statement doesn't withstand scrutiny when put into certain context but I don't think it's hyperbole in this discussion.

> And it's also not a stretch to suggest that a government that defines separatism and religion as two of it's three defined evils is committing cultural genocide on a large (millions+) section of it's country that doesn't conform to the rest of it's society.

I’ve already addressed the million+ figure and cultural genocide point above. As far as the Three Evils, religion is not one of them. Religious extremism is (for example, Wahhabism and Salafism). Many religions are practiced openly in China today. There are 39,000 mosques in China, many of them paid for by the state. Separatism is considered an evil for obvious reasons. Namely, it undermines the stability of society which can lead to large scale consequences in a country of 1.4 billion that is barely four decades removed from third world status, like China.

> There is only so much time in the day, and today I'll spend most of mine scrutinizing the layout of virtual networking devices. In order to receive news and information about topics I am less knowledgeable about I unfortunately must entrust others with the credibility to perform this scrutiny on my behalf. The ones I entrust to do this may fail, but that doesn't mean that I'd necessarily do better than them.

This is all fine and understandable. But if that is the case, don’t you think it would be better not to perpetuate conjecture masquerading as facts which can’t withstand basic scrutiny?

> But if that is the case, don’t you think it would be better not to perpetuate conjecture masquerading as facts which can’t withstand basic scrutiny

Not any more than claiming that research data is automatically conflicted out just because it receives government funding.

I’ve merely said that there exists a conflict of interest due to funding sources, which is a legitimate concern in any context let alone geopolitics.

I’ve never advocated for automatically dismissing anything wherein a conflict of interest exists, only to regard it with a critical eye and a grain of salt.

It's not necessary to be outright 'authoritarian'. The 'national security' excuse goes a loooong way in the USA when the government wants something from a company. Also, financial sanctions can be equally effective for competing companies, or even just the carrot for the company that plays ball, like the alleged payments for Skype, Google, Microsoft, and others in PRISM.

This has very little to do with politics. I don't think there can be any serious debate about who is more authoritarian and who has a worse record in terms of human rights in our times. But:

- There is no guarantee that a backdoor introduced by the US will only be used by the US, or by someone with whom the US has willingly and knowingly shared knowledge about the backdoor. For all we know the MSS might be spying on some citizens using US backdoors in US chips.

- There is no guarantee that the US will always use a backdoor introduced by it for morally infallible reasons. That's a risk with any weapon, of course, and it's super easy to write it up under the cost of doing business -- right until the cost of doing business involves your own device and your own life.

- Even if you trust the checks and balances of US government completely, there is no guarantee that all governments with whom the US would share the backdoor have the same checks and balances in place.

It's not like the backdoor will ask an attacker for their US passport and a search warrant before allowing access.

So it's okay if the US monitors and intercepts global communications. But it's bad if China does it?

There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do. So yes, it's way worse if China does it. Because there not beyond imprisoning or killing people over information gained. Secondly we have no reason to believe the US had implemented backdoors in major processors.

The problem with the OP is it's whataboutism, it's a logical fallacy to say well A does something bad too, so B doing something bad is equivalent. That's a false equivalency.

>There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do.

I am a German citizen living in the UK and I own a Huawei phone. A while ago the American president issued a domestic law and I still don't know whether my phone will be usable in the future or not.

I am not aware of China having any ability or willingness to do the same. As a European citizen I am accustomed to feel the effects of US politics, I can't say the same thing about China.

If anything the loss of US control in the future gives me modest hope for more alternatives and competition.

>Secondly we have no reason to believe the US had implemented backdoors in major processors.

Intel Management Engine has the capability to be a backdoor[1]. Whether the US has keys to it is in question. But it is known that Intel has included features on chips for the NSA[2].

[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-the-intel-management...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-visa-undocumented-fe...

"There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do."

Written into laws that obviously can be ignore with no repercussions.

Hardly.

How many US officials were tried, let alone convicted, for their role in torturing people from 2001 to 2014?

Hint: zero.

(The 11 soldiers who were torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib were not tried for torture. Only watered down charges like dereliction of duty, assault, and battery.)

> There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do.

I don't care about the US promising they won't be bad. The fact that their companies can be forced to install surveillance mechanisms is already the worst case scenario for a hardware buyer. Beyond that, I don't care if it's the Americans, the Chinese or the fucking aliens doing the spying.

> There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do.

These limitations and checks are written into laws. These laws can be easily ignored. Remind me as to how many of the 11 soldiers actively torturing people in Abu Gharib and Bagram were actually tried for their crimes?

Also, Bush doesn't seem to be in jail.

>There are a lot more limitations and checks on what the US can do

If only those "limitations and checks" were actually followed by the US government and intelligence agencies. Here are some examples I collected during a previous discussion of US vs China surveillance states

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/national-id-hr4760-biometri...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-...

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voice-recognition-techno...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

https://freedom.press/news/revealed-justice-depts-secret-rul...

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles...

https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel

https://www.eff.org/cases/hepting

https://www.eff.org/cases/smith-v-obama

https://apnews.com/d69a8e6db867477795f4152d0511bbf9

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-records-fact...

>Because there not beyond imprisoning or killing people over information gained

The US government also certainly uses the information gained to kill and/or imprison people, although you could perhaps argue that the scale is not the same

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-cias-k...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/?utm_term=.dc5b7bd3682e

>we have no reason to believe the US had implemented backdoors in major processors.

There is evidence that US intelligence agencies have backdoored products in the past. Personally, that's reason enough to believe that they may have backdoored processors as well

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/519661/nsas-own-hardware-...

The United States has been executing people overseas for decades without any oversight. Predator drones during the Bush/Obama/Trump eras have only increased in use with no sign of decreasing.

If you read The Dictators Handbook, the author talks about how more democratic nations use foreign aid as a means to prop up autocratic nations in order to extract their resources (autocracy overseas to support the standard of living of those who are your selectorate).

It's like we totally forgot about the 2013 NSA spying revelations, or the 1973 CIA backed coupe in Chile, or the US overthrowing a democratically elected government during the Iranian-Contra crisis...

We should absolutely be concerned that the United States could (and does) inject backdoors to spy on other nations, because causing them to destabilize helps with resource extraction and to keep prices low, pleasing the domestic constituency.

Yeah, because the US is not "equally authoritarian", so the rest of the world shouldn't mind!

E.g. Chile where they helped establish Pinochet to power should feel secure. Italy where they collaborated with far right groups and deep state against democracy should also feel OK. And so on...

Nobody said it's ok.

So what did you imply with "Let's not pretend the US and China are equally authoritarian please", if not that it's, if not OK, then at least OK-er?

I didn't imply anything. I merely pointed out there not equivalent. That does not imply everything the US does is ok.

It's not OK. It's bad if either do it. So if your response to "China is bad" is not "That is bad" but "The US is bad too!", then it's a big red flag that the discussion isn't about security, but something else.

The entire discussion started not with whether "China is bad", but whether US is better:

> Hopefully this will push RISC-V manufacturing efforts in the US before the market becomes flooded with cheap open source and most likely backdoored chips manufactured in China

No one said it's ok, so you're operating under false assumptions.

Whataboutism is still a fallacy. Yes, it's bad if the US does bad things. It is in fact also bad if China does bad things.

China oppresses its own people, while US oppresses people in Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. US being perceived as a lesser evil doesn't make its chips more secure than Chinese chips.

Security comes from rigorous research and evidence, not paranoia or prejudice.

It's not about being authoritarian or not (we all know who wins in here).

Many people/companies don't have much to hide from China but they do from the US.

> Many people/companies don't have much to hide from China but they do from the US.

Please explain

Not equally authoritarian maybe. I don't think the US would have any more qualms about backdooring CPUs then China would have.

Yea true. America is worse.

You need to substantiate such a claim. Also HN has some rules about inflammatory comments.

The comment I replied to both had nothing backing up his claim, and was inflammatory.

Congratulations. Two wrongs don't make a right here.

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't realize.

>Is there a way to know that the present chips are not backdoored?...

As a practical matter, that's largely irrelevant to us in the West. The world that's shaping up is a world where we won't be able to get those processors in any case.

Because most of the world has flourished under Pax Americana. The world can only imagine what the Chinese as a world power will bring.

I imagine Latin America and the Middle East would disagree a tad bit with you.

Latin America absolutely would. Yes, there were crimes that we shouldn't forget, but the whole hemisphere is vastly wealthier than it was a century ago, owing almost exclusively to global peace, world trade, and their existence within the US sphere of influence that limited conflict to just a few hot spots.

The middle east didn't see the same benefit, and why? Because they sat in the middle of a cold war zone of contention that stoked every existing bit of strife into a hot war.

Middle East is a completely different and much longer story and USA just got involved in a drive-by fashion merely decades ago.

Setting up the case to bomb Iraq twice is a little more than a drive-by. Its more like pre-medidated murder i'd say

The US has been involved one way or another in the Middle East since they took over assets of the British and French Empire in the Region.

Africa would likely disagree as well.

In fact I had this very discussion with a group of Africans recently. Yeah, they weren't shy about "educating" me. Some of what they believe is, in my view, not fact based. (At least, it can't be proven in court so to speak.) But, yeah, a lot of what they were saying was definitely true.

> Some of what they believe is, in my view, not fact based.

I wouldn't mind hearing what some of those things are.

So, I must be in gratitude with USA, for helping a fascist regime on my country for nearly 40 years ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com