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Comment by khuey | Hacker News Reader

Discovery in this should be fun on both sides.

Yes. It is no surprise that they sue, but maybe that was a mistake. Because depending on the result, it might get TikTok banned in the EU as well.

Or the result is that indeed their operation is 100% independent of their Chinese parent company and no US data ever touches mainland China... which would surprise me.

Honest question: would it matter if they stored data in mainland china? Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov? (Not that i really believe that any data in china is safe from gov, although i could say the same about usa, but what is the actual bar that the us gov has to meet to show its a national security risk? Is data on china soil sufficient?)

> Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov?

That situation does not exist. Chinese law basically means that any data held in China can be accessed by the government at any time.

Like in the US..., you just need a warrant which is just paperwork.

Unfortunately the FISA courts have been abused like crazy. But warrants aren't just paperwork. If you're charged with a crime but the prosecution has violated your rights, you can walk free in the U.S. You have multiple layers of appeals courts to go through if you get railroaded. The CCP is truly authoritarian and rules and laws are what they say they are. Not even remotely equivalent.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/fisa-investigation

We're trying to roll that back apparently. I don't have a lot of hope but we'll see. These politicians are all basically under fire this november so they better damnwell hustle.

Also, FWIW, companies can release FISA statements saying they've been accessed. How much of that is actually true depends on your level of paranoia.

Snowden revealed a FISA warrant that granted access to data on all Verizon calls. At the point that courts are granting such broad (and blatantly unconstitutional) warrants, warrants don't matter any more.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...

Is that unique to Chinese law?

The unique part of Chinese law is the lack of judicial supremacy or "rule of law". The party has supremacy over legal system interpretation as part of the '3 Supremes' order of precedence, with workers also coming ahead of the law.

In the US system, there are still miscarriages of Justice, but there is judicial supremacy and separation of powers.

The powers aren't as separated as say the French justice system, but most would say the US judicial system is mostly independent of the other branches of government.

> The party has supremacy over legal system interpretation as part of the '3 Supremes' order of precedence, with workers also coming ahead of the law.

Very few people are aware about this. The party is supreme and institutions like PLA are answerable to the party, not to the people.

US institutions also answer to the US government...

Judges don’t answer to the government. They can be impeached, but that effectively never happens.

So they answer to no one?

They can be overruled by higher courts, and in some localities they’re forced to run for election.

We trust them to answer to SCOTUS, who we in turn trust to interpret the constitution that a majority of us have agreed to keep. Basically a group of people whose entire job is to interpret the actions in terms of law, constitution, and human rights - a marrying of theories on social contract, natural rights, and separation of powers that we've seen emulated (and improved upon) across the free world :)

Overall, I particularly enjoy this system over one that is accountable to a single entity.

Yes, and those leading the government are elected by the people every few years.

I always find the terminology strange.

If there is only one party permitted, and that one party is supreme, then how is that a party? It looks like government to me. Maybe the translation to English is just wrong. The "party" isn't a party by any reasonable definition.

The real parties would be factions within the so-called party. I don't know if they have names more descriptive than "Xi supporters" and "Xi opponents".

Yeah, buy according to US law American companies must comply with government requests even if the data is stored abroad.

So basically, why should anyone trust a US company if US thinks tiktok giving data to their government is a problem?

American companies have a legal system to protect them against unlawful requests. That rule of law is under attack, but exists, which does not seem to be the case for China.

Don’t National Security Letters and a Secret Courts bypass that?

They don't, hence why EU has data residency requirements, and American companies set up firewalled entities to comply (eg. Azure Germany).

You need to read the laws in China where they require any chinese company or individual to hand over data to the chinese government on request, no exception, no lawsuit, period.

> Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov?

Hard to say if it's even enough to keep it outside of China. As long as the company is under Chinese jurisdiction, they'll have a hard time saying "no, sorry, that data center is in Singapore, we won't comply".

The EU has similar issues with the US cloud providers: even if an Amazon data center is in the EU, obviously they will hand over data if a US court order/NSL tells them to. One way that Microsoft tried to mitigate that was to have a data trustee run the data centers with Microsoft not having access, therefore not being able to give anything to the government. They've stopped offering it after a few years though.

Why would it have any impact on EU ?

I believe Huawei sued and lost.

Do you have source for this? Huawei sued but we haven't heard any updates on that yet.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/19/tech/huawei-us-lawsuit-reject...

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