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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Is that because China's government has direct access to the data in WeChat?

I mean the US government has that as well with Google and FB and co (see Snowden revelations), but apparently not as much as they'd like.

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What part of the Snowden revelations showed that the US government has "direct access" to Facebook and Google data?

>The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.

>The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I...

From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets).

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The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.

Yes, and they can implement their digital social-credit based punishments through WeChat, e.g. controlling what the user can spend currency on through the app, what types of travel they can use, etc.

Political enemies will have a rough life there.

We similarly can't abandon google because they "accidentally" banned someone without any explanation. (a false positives) Trial by robot can be even more unreasonable than a dictator.

That can't really be a motivation for not breaking monopolies though, because as you point out, both China and the US have access to everyone's data. So it is reasonable to assume that China and US would have access to everyone's data if a different company was the monopoly or even if multiple different companies provided the access. From the perspective of the government, they don't care. They just require you to tell them what they want to know whenever they ask. Controlling the population via control of the population's digital activities, which often translates to control of the population's physical activities.

China is just more ruthless on the level of the market in that if you win in China, it really is winner take all. There are no controls on the market to stop monopolies forming.

There is no wechat. Everything is a subsidiary of the CCP

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