Chinese Mass Surveillance – Snowden | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Mass Surveillance – Snowden

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98 pointscyrksoft23 comments

Interrogated because he complained about the police. They were oddly specific about the time the message was sent - yesterday around 9. Impressive turnaround for pursuing a thought crime: <24h.

This is what all countries can look forward to when encryption is restricted or not end to end.

It’s also a good reminder to treat fellow humans with respect even when you vehemently disagree on controversial topics. The right to expression must be protected.

The thing he complained about in the chat group (the cops confiscating motorbikes) was disturbingly common to see when I lived in Shanghai. A guy riding his tricycle (sometimes with a small battery to take the load off) piled high with cardboard he's bought from shops or scrap metal that he's bought from construction sites. He takes it to the recycling place and sells it for a profit of what probably amounts to a few dollars a day. And he's the first guy the cops seem to target to impound his bike, either because he was riding somewhere bikes are not allowed to, or because he doesn't have a license to make those few dollars a day doing that.

I'd just like to note, this article is being downweighted very heavily. At the time of writing, it's 3 hours old with 77 points, yet it's in 97th place - 4th page, among day old articles with tens of points. On the other hand, "ChezWEB: Hygienic Literate Programming for Chez Scheme" is in 11th place, with 19 points and 6 hours old.

I think political articles are downweighted in favor of more tech/hacker news, but "How Smartphones Betray Democracy" is in 23rd place, with 136 points and 12 hours old. Similar topic and age/points ratio to this one.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/12/31/dont-call-xi-bun-chine...

And interestly, WeChat claims they don't store user messages, but Chinese police apparently has it. Any app, website or forum on which users can post comments must verify ID-linked phone numbers first.

> WeChat claims they don't store user messages

Does it really matter if it is PSB who stores it? :)

Special police in every major city have a few hundred people whose full time job is to go through online correspondence. That's not even a secret.

Unfortunately, this is quickly coming to the West as well. I believe twitter, facebook, imgur, and gmail (and I'm sure I missed many others) all require phone number verification, and most countries require some sort of ID to get a phone number.

And I say this with the direct opposite intent of whataboutism - it's horrifying in China, and if we let it, it'll be just as horrifying here.

I think we all know this means Chinese Quantum decryption efforts are further along than we thought.

Encryption is either broken or its not. No one has broken modern strong encryption yet. Quantum computing as a threat to strong encryption is still purely theoretical. Also, you don’t need to use a quantum computer to break encryption when you hold the private keys, you just decode to plain text the normal way. This is exactly what they did

Just to add a bit to this thought: Recent news about RSA keys and prime factoring seems to all be written as if there is pretty much no reason left to use encryption. But as jtms alludes, these important discoveries do have an immediate impact on weak encryption, which should be understood to mean decades-old outdated technologies. As far as strong encryption goes, quantum computing is still seriously far off unless a new discovery comes around to improve the results considerably.

Compared to the human life cycle, quantum cryptography is at the "on the verge of speaking in coherent sentences, but still prone to smearing feces on the wall" age and stage. You can sense that they'll grow up to be quite smart, but there's a lot of learning to go before you can hope for a Junior Einstein.

China has to be on track for a revolution. Not today, not this year, probably not even this decade. But the human spirit cannot abide this level of oppression forever without recourse.

The trick is to make just enough people of a society interest-vested and happy, gradually you can basically ignore the rest as they are poor and underpriviledged, especially since technology is more omnipresent and powerful than ever.

I think people need to stop believing this. It's how they got to this stage anyway. As long as western country trade with china and it raises their standard of living I doubt anything will change.

I don't think that's the case. That's a very teleological perspective. China is a very deontological society. I get the impression that many people in China would agree with the punishment in these instances. It's very weird to me. But it is what it is. When I talk with Chinese people, they would either agree with it, or they would prefer to say something like, "He should have known that he'd get punished for that." Never have I heard someone say something like, "Sheesh, that sucks." Definitely never have I heard someone say something like, "This is an outrage."

Depends on which Chinese people you talk to.

Yes, probably so. But I've lived 9 years in China now. I have friends across a wide spectrum of society. Anyone who actually doesn't like it still only say things like, "He should have known he would be punished for it. You shouldn't do things that put you in jail. You have responsibility to take care of your family and yourself first. You shouldn't be stupid."

Status quo is a powerful thing. Lord Vetinari was onto something when he claimed people just want the same day follow the day before.

Most Chinese don't hate the party, this is hard to believe for many people. As interest-vested, the most common way is buying over-priced condos, you don't want to lose money, and you want to double what you invested like so many others did.

Free speech ends when you lose anonymity.

No, free speech ends when you need to be anonymous to speak freely.

It’s both, losing your right to anonymity is a separate, but highly related rights violation (aka: right to privacy)

Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. [..] It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation--and their ideas from suppression--at the hand of an intolerant society.

    -- United States Supreme Court, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission

Wow that cage thing he’s in is terrifying. Presumably the video was released to send a message

"Uncle Police" must be the Chinese term for "Big Brother"

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