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> Our government routinely performs dystopian forced mass-surveillance of citizens accompanied by gag orders.

With nowhere near the same implications.

> The US government is no stranger to this, where COINTELPRO [1] used the results of domestic spying to try to put an early end to MLK and the Civil Rights Movement.

The big difference being that COINTELPRO was not done with the authorization of Congress and instead lead to a Congressional investigation and later the Senate Intelligence Committee to provide oversight [1]. The airing of those abuses culminated in additional oversight of domestic intelligence activities.

In China, the airing of those abuses would end with the journalists being censored/bagged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

> The CCP could have all the data they want on you but there is almost nothing they can do about it

Oceans are a great shield against blackmail...

> One way to do this is a National Security Letter

A National Security Letter is hardly an absolute order. They can be reviewed by a judge. They cannot include requests for content like messages. Those require a warrant. They can be beaten in court. They are not a broad tool that the NSA can apply as they wish for whatever ends they wish. Not only that, citizens are allowed to oppose it and elect legislators to repeal them.

> And neither does the CCP. Neither does the NSA, actually, unless they want something from you and to force you to do something.

Except there is a massive difference in what each wants from you.

> but the US also doesn't have anywhere close to the moral high ground w.r.t. domestic surveillance as you mention.

The lack of prisons full of political dissidents who committed thought crimes on the internet puts them head and shoulders above. The existence of an independent judiciary does as well.

>instead lead to a Congressional investigation and later the Senate Intelligence Committee to provide oversight

Though, it lead to no actual punishment for anyone involved in the program. Further, the only reason such a show trial was possible was that the CIA accidentally missed a box of records when they destroyed all of the evidence. What use is oversight when the agency can destroy all the evidence?

> What use is oversight when the agency can destroy all the evidence?

What use is {x} when someone can {attempt to avoid x}?

Because we live in the real world, and no authority is omniscient and absolute.

I think the point was that they were allowed to destroy the evidence or at least did not get punished for it.

The question should be whether the CCP has a long game where the youth potentially being tracked and catalogued today are the leaders, politicians, diplomats, journalists, etc that may be of interest to have influence over in the future.

Generally with totalitarian governments, the propaganda and control is for domestic consumption to maintain their power, but this does also extend to nationals living abroad. However the CCP does have ambitions for empire in the shorter term that should be cause for alarm and vigilance.

I’m guessing it’s more about criticism.

Getting eveyone to acknowledge China as undisputed rulers of whatever territory China decides is China.

Strong effort these to have “fact checkers” on anything potentially political. At some this will be the job of one government or another.

Russia had the Joke department. Gotta make sure all jokes are correct thinking.

> A National Security Letter is hardly an absolute order.

What % of NSL has been turned down ? FISA warrant rejection rate is like 12 for 30,000+ warrants. For all intents it is absolute order if the Courts hardly reject it.

> The lack of prisons full of political dissidents ...

Your prisons are fuller than any other large developed country more than 3 million people are in prison, your judicial systems are racially and economically biased . In a country embodying capitalism, is this not worse than putting dissidents in prison? At least they actually have to dissent before being put in jail, here the system is rigged such that poor hardly have a vote or voice, rich keep paying lower tax than middle class, and gets exploited and still happily vote for the people robbing them blind.

Perhaps you have better rights as a citizen, the rest of us around the globe not so much.

China does not kill by drone extra judicially outside their country. I don't have to be afraid of clear skies.

I don't have to as afraid that I will be grabbed by Chinese Intelligence to a black site like Guantanamo bay with no legal course or judicial oversight.

I need to be lot more worried of U.S. funding and meddling in local politics than of China. Every single time U.S. has engaged in covert/ overt meddling in ME/Lat Am , Far East etc, it has always lead to lot of death and suffering.

For citizens of the world there is no protection, If I do business with FAANG outside the U.S. and even if keep my data outside, still U.S. courts have full rights to grab my data, against my country laws under which the tech giants supposed to operate in my country .

For all your rights and amendments against surveillance and wire-tapping on paper , the rest of the world has none. Your security agencies can legally monitor at anyone at will without any oversight.

U.S. companies have and continue to backdoor / frontdoor everywhere in the world as they please, and suffer no consequences.

Privacy and basic human rights should not be just American right, I hope rest of us get treated as humans too in your system.

Does it make China better? of course not! it is not whataboutism. Both are bad.

For rest of us, the U.S. has already done lot more damage. China will do lot more damage in the future no doubt, but today U.S. is in no position to talk .

>At least they actually have to dissent before being put in jail,

I mean, can't you say the same about the US? All you have to do is not commit crimes.

edit:

>China does not kill by drone extra judicially outside their country. I don't have to be afraid of clear skies.

A few comments down: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...

Drone strikes are blunt instruments it indiscriminately kills innocent men , women and children just in collateral damage , even if the target was justified . Many times target is not even correctly identified.

A responsible government would not kill without a trial , without the chance for the accused to face his accusers, there is no judicial oversight to any of this .

I am not sure kidnapping people( bad as it is) compares to a drone strike . No national security concern should justify killing children and lack of real outrage makes the amercian public complicit too.

Many incarcerated people in the US are being held pre-trial. Here's a quick quote I found on Wikipedia:

> In 2020, the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative issued a report,"Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020," that said, based on the most recent census data and information from the Bureau of Prisons, an overwhelming majority of inmates in county and municipal jails were being held pre-trial, without having been convicted of a crime

> In 2017, 482,100 inmates in federal and state prisons were held pre-trial.

That's not 3 million but it's quite a lot.

There are hundreds of thousands sitting in US prisons who haven't been convicted because they can't post bail. There are judges being paid in the back by private prisons to convict and send innocent people to jail because it's good for business. US prison and justice system is completely broken.

Over-incarceration is big problem yes, but a red herring to the direct targeting and silencing of all political opposition.

They are taking people off streets in unmarked vans for protesting against police brutality and for BLM in the USA. If that isn't "being targeted for political opposition" Then i don't know what is.

At least you can plausibility make the case that they've committed some sort of crime (eg. property damage). Also, AFAIK no one had been "disappeared" (ie. they were released one or two days after). To be clear, the administration's actions were despicable and may be unconstitutional, but they're nowhere close to the actions that the CCP takes against dissidents and journalists. We haven't seen trump kidnap journalists from the "mainstream media" that he hates so much, for instance.

Those things are illegal in China . Every country has its own idea of laws and freedoms . We may not like it , but according to their laws it is a legal action

For example , It is hard for me to see why drugs are criminalised so much in the U.S. a little weed could get you 10 years in prison till few years back ,civil forfeiture, abortion laws or why laws in your country all horrify me.

To understand guns laws , I will have to understand the rationale of second amendment the long history of gun ownership.

Similarly to under China today , there is 2,000 year history you will need to keep in context .

Again not defending China , it is important to see how we see things coloured by our own biases.

>Those things are illegal in China . Every country has its own idea of laws and freedoms . We may not like it , but according to their laws it is a legal action

Oh please, give me a break. There's no rule of law in China, only rule by law. Just ask the Canadians that just happened to break some law right after Meng got detained in Canada.

Also, "damaging property" as a crime and being detained near the scene of a protest turned violent is way more universally accepted as illegal than whatever trumped up charges of "spreading false rumors" that the Chinese legal system levies against dissidents.

> There's no rule of law in China, only rule by law.

There's an epidemic of extrajudicial killings in the US right now. Indefinite detention without trial and torture have been normalized under three presidents, and one can't expect change there under Biden, so we're looking at a quarter century of these policies at a minimum.

The danger of whataboutism is that the US doesn't have a leg to stand on anymore.

The most recent execution of Canadians in China have been on drug charges. They had trials, it's crime and punishment by the books. Sure, it's politically motivated, but is it worse than a drug dealer getting shot dead while running away from a police officer?

And when we look at the history of criminalizing drug use and possession, who's responsible? China started cracking down because the British demand for opium was harmful to the Chinese people. The US started, and continues to wage, a "war on drugs" which was really a war on marginalized populations and an excuse to exercise imperial power in the middle east and south america. Rule by law, indeed.

The CCP could have all the data they want on you but there is almost nothing they can do about it because an ocean and a military separates you, outside some fringe cases

Interesting, I’m sure you’re aware of the CCP coercing critics (who are US citizens) by threatening their families in China?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-wray-idUSKBN248...

I'm sure that's among the cases he meant when he said "fringe cases". Most Americans don't have families in China

Why are these fringe cases? If anything these are the obvious cases where the CCP can use data they have on you (i.e. who your family members are, your history of criticism, etc.) and use that to silence you.

Yeah, but it only works when they have some kind of leverage on you. A very lazy google search tells me that there are about 4 million Chinese Americans, which is 1.3% of the population. So 1.3% of Americans could be manipulated this way. That is a lot, and I think 'fringe' is hyperbole, but I still agree with the sentiment that the typical American can feel pretty safe from China. Expats and Americans with family or friends in China are obvious exceptions, as are people who have sent explicit photos or had affairs on Chinese apps, and people who are in debt with Chinese companies.

Those are what comes to mind for me, and maybe there are more ways China could threaten an individual in the US, but I still think it's at most 5% of Americans who could be personally targeted by China (and I do think it's good to ban TikTok because I do not want that number to go up).

Meanwhile US surveillance affects 100% of Americans. We have stronger rights and don't have to fear being disappeared for dissenting, but mass surveillance has the power to suppress or misdirect speech and there are entities in the US that are figuring out how to use that.

And our leaders wine and dine with people who we call allies and good friends yet have their journalists, activists and political rivals killed without flinching.

You don't see anyone in power losing sleep over the Saudis or Israel constantly assassinating people they don't like. Or even bothering to care about a madman like Duterte from going on extrajudicial rampages and killing tens of thousands of his own citizens. Apparently they're the good guys because they fall into line with us.

>The CCP could have all the data they want on you but there is almost nothing they can do about it because an ocean and a military separates you, outside some fringe cases.

Not yet, but they recently passed a law that says otherwise.

Interesting you should mention Snowden. The phrase that haunted me from that first interview with Snowden is "turnkey tyranny". The powers of the US security apparatus and its FAANG deputies are vast, unparalleled. My belief (I may be wrong) is that Five Eyes are still far and away the premier intelligence superpower, with China a distant second (or Russia, I don't know).

The difference is that China actively abuses the powers it has, restricts its citizens on the internet, surveils their legal rights (not just their borrowing status a la credit ratings) with the state-controlled social credit scores, and continues to track apostates who emigrate abroad. It's China that is working on the model modern tech-enabled concentration camp for ethnic minorities in Xinjiang (although the word genocide would be hyperbolic here: We have no evidence of extermination or of plans in that direction). Moreover, the CCP has gone in the wrong direction under Xi, away from a stable oligarchy that was progressive in certain areas, and towards dictatorship and lockdown.

If a true totalitarian ever controlled the US security apparatus, such a tyrant could turn that turnkey. (I'm not talking about Trump, who might try some unconstitutional tricks, but when he's defeated in court, tweets something nasty about the judge, then abides by the ruling). Right now, however, the US still has restraint, has checks & balances, which are imperfect but let's not underestimate them or be ungrateful. Similarly, although things are fraught with traditional US allies like NATO, it's not like the US is leveraging even a fraction of its sigint supremacy in, say, agricultural trade negotiations with France.

Point is, US & allied capabilities are scarier than any other country by far, but the way that China (and Russia, though overhyped) actively use their power in practice is way more insidious. The media has educated people to call out "whatabout-ism" when they see it in the Trump crowd. Let's call it out when we see it from the fascist CCP and their apologists.

>although the word genocide would be hyperbolic here: We have no evidence of extermination or of plans in that direction

Clearly you haven't been following up or digging to hard, as forced sterilization programs qualify in the U.N. working definition of genocide. Just because there are no ovens and gas chambers, does not mean it isn't happening.

Further, your classification of what Trump has been doing as "Tricks" cements for me at it least some level of disingenuity. There are things you don't do as an official of the State, and the Trump admin has gone leaps and bounds passed just about every other historical example I could find in terms of trying to coax the line of Unconstitutionality you can getaway with just that much further. Though I appreciate the distinction you're making between Trump who'll push as far as he get away with vs an individual who refuses to be stopped.

However, I do absolutely agree with you on the relative capabilities of the intelligence community of the West. The level of integration of data streams strived for is nothing short of "Total Information Awareness". There is no room in a world of men for such power. I'm not even convinced it should be wielded under the auspices of being a national secutrity/defense apparatus; however as long as one Nation is willing to have one, it's pretty much inevitable everyone else will too.

The US absolutely has the moral high ground compared to any communist country and it’s not even fucking close.

Take care of the education of your poorest citizens, stop orchestrating coups, stop imprisoning black men en masse, give people single-payer healthcare. Then we can talk about moral high ground.

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

While bad, not one of these rises to the level of genocide and oppression that form the core of China's tactics to control its population and exert influence abroad, and, yes, that does mean from a moral perspective the US is better. "Terrible" is still better than "inhumane".

I'm really sick of this. The Verge's article [1] is the yardstick for just how far America's own self-hatred will go. To compare the present genocide of an entire culture to America's sins, right now, would be laughable but that so many Americans have bought wholesale into its fantasy. If you were to gather up the prison industrial complex and the tens of thousands failed by privatized healthcare, it would be a drop in the bucket.

The CCP's orchestrated intent to scrub out 2 peoples and their religions from the face of the earth on their way to a 3rd complete, divisible nation (Taiwan) has not been seen since Nazi Germany. This is the scale of atrocity and disrespect for the basic right of a human being to say, "I am who I am", we are dealing with at this very moment in human history.

Please, please, consider that however tough things are in the US for very many people, it can change with a vote. That is a democracy, however broken and fragile.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/21355465/tiktok-us-china-informatio...

Genocide? How about native Americans?

Nk other nation in world history has caused more destabilisation and upheavel across the globe than the USA. Arming terrorists, starting wars for oil, dropping millions of tonnes of cluster bombs over vast areas, spraying civilians with horrible chemicals that caused birth defects for decades, dropping atomic bombs on cities, faking evidence of WMDs, assassinating leaders, constant drone murder-without-trial strikes in foreign nations with "collateral damage", overthrowing democracies, putting in dictators, mass surveillance and the most organised and terrifying system of rendition and torture that has ever existed.

The human cost in death, maiming and misery is absolutely incalculable.

Frankly, I'm really sick of people sticking their head in the sand and not looking closer to home before they attack others because "we're the gold guys" and "they're evil communists".

The hypocrisy is simply stunning.

>. To compare the present genocide of an entire culture to America's sins, right now, would be laughable

Really? As much as I dislike cultural genocide, such as the still ongoing cultural genocide against Native Americans, I fail to see how it is a graver sin than the Iraq War. And please, tell me how my vote can stop it.

> The NSA, however, can and will use data they collect on you against you.

The NSA can't collect your data if you are a US citizen or are a non-US citizen inside the US, and they certainly can't "use [it] against you."

> Have you not heard of PRISM? The US routinely can and does force companies to give up information on citizens in the form of dragnet surveillance.

PRISM does not use dragnet surveillance. It's right there in the slides that Snowden leaked and repeated in the documents the government declassified. https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...

The NSA cannot legally do so (usually, exceptions exist), or utilise the information specifically in a court of law. Legal definitions of what does or does not specifically constitute "search" are vague to the point of meaninglessness.

The four other members of the Five Eyes are under no such restrictions, among others, and parallel construction can at least putatively separate the fruit from its poisonous tree.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s-dir...

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/450393-nsa-impr...

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/newly-declassified-court-do...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-w...

Say you're the NSA. By law, there are certain sorts of spying you're not lawfully allowed to do on Americans. (And agency rules constraining you too.) But wait. Allied countries have different laws and surveillance rules. If there are times when America's spy agency has an easier time spying on Brits, and times when Britain's spying agency has an easier time spying on Americans, it's easy to see where the incentives lead. Put bluntly, intelligence agencies have an incentive to make themselves complicit in foreign governments spying on their own citizens.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/is-the-...

The law is bendy when the actions are all secret and you don't have anyone challenging you. it's enough to make up a semi plausible legal argument/loophole to cover your ass. See eg the treatment of legal coverage in the James Banford books - there's usually a i house lawyer who is paid to have opinions favourable to the agency.

Particularly where lack of standing, mooting by the government dropping its case, or most problematical of all, state secrets privilege, born of U.S. v. Reynolds.

See: "State Secrets Privilege"

Essentially, by invoking the state secrets privilege in this way, the government argues that even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.

In response to the government’s assertion, and as it has since the first wiretapping cases started in 2006, EFF argues that in creating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress preempted the state secrets privilege, creating a separate but still very secure way for the case to be decided. The FISA law not only prevents the immediate dismissal of the case, it affirmatively instructs courts to determine whether electronic surveillance is legal....

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/state-secrets-privilege

Snowden since then released a cache of documents showing that the NSA wasn't doing what the EFF suspected. Continuing to claim otherwise is conspiracy theory raving.

Care to link?

This or any of your numerous other conspicuously unsourced claims?

Are any of your claims sourced? You linked to documents that either had nothing to do with your claims or directly refuted them. I, on the other hand, posted a CNET article that directly supported my PRISM claim.

I'll let you look this one up yourself. It might take you some time to find it, but by doing it yourself, you'll learn some things that will fix a few other conspiracy theories you might have that you haven't brought up yet. Look for "minimization" and "Section 702." Both will be good starting points.

> The four other members of the Five Eyes are under no such restrictions.

None of your links provide any evidence that they do so, which makes sense because the agreement that the Five Eyes programs derive from was a no-spy agreement between the members. If the US government asked other countries to spy on its citizens to skirt its own laws, there would have been evidence in Snowden's document haul, and that would have been the biggest story in them. Instead, bupkis.

To reiterate the initial point, I don't know why you have those links given that they say absolutely nothing that supports your claim.

Addressing surveillance of UK nationals by the NSA:

The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America's National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...

Reuters reports the agreement as reciprocal:

Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has tapped fibre-optic cables that carry international phone and internet traffic and is sharing vast quantities of personal information with the U.S. National Security Agency, the Guardian newspaper said on Friday.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-security-britain/briti...

Lawfare on the Five Eyes agreement itself which specifically does permit information sharing:

Born from spying arrangements forged during World War II, the Five Eyes alliance facilitates the sharing of signals intelligence among the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The Five Eyes countries agree to exchange by default all signals intelligence they gather, as well as methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/newly-disclosed-documents-five-e...

Your first link supports my point that it emerged from a no-spy agreement between the parties: "Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others." It has nothing that supports your point because nowhere in it does it say the UK uses that data to skirt its own laws, and it is obvious that the US collecting data on Britons does not break its own laws.

Your second link simply states that the UK has access to intercepts that it shares with the US. It doesn't say that the US asks the UK for data on people it is prohibited by law from spying on.

Your third link likewise does not say anything about any of the member countries illegally spying on their own citizens using other countries' data.

This all makes sense because what you are claiming is illegal, and there would have been lawsuits against the US government about it if there were any evidence (even the slightest hint of any evidence) it was happening because it would be by far the most egregious overreach in the leaks. The government cannot pay a third party to illegally search a US citizen any more than it can pay a third party to illegally detain one. Instead, the only illegal US program in Snowden's leaks was the phone metadata collection, which has since been shut down.

> It doesn't say that the US asks the UK for data on people it is prohibited by law from spying on.

From the quote of the third link:

> The Five Eyes countries agree to exchange by default all signals intelligence they gather, as well as methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations.

This seems like a pretty clear implication that a Five Eyes country gets information about its own citizens via automatic sharing of information gathered by the other countries. Whether they technically "asked" for the information or not is not relevant.

> This seems like a pretty clear implication that a Five Eyes country gets information about its own citizens via automatic sharing of information gathered by the other countries.

No, it does not. If it did, Snowden's documents would have contained evidence showing that the NSA either has a copy of the GCHQ wiretap data or that the NSA has direct query access to it, either of which would have been a blockbuster story. There was no such evidence.

Instead, what your quote means is that the parties to the agreement can ask the other parties for any information about their collection they like, and the default response (if there are no overriding rules) will be to return that information. The US cannot ask another country for data about its own citizens without a warrant because, as I've stated multiple times, that is illegal.

You are creating some all-seeing bogeyman by misreading some words. This is better than dredmorbius's comments in that you misread some words instead of not reading them and pretending they said something, but do you understand that misreading words is how conspiracy theories are created?