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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.

You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.

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The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out.

I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance is the norm.

> The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it.

Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China

Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way. After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them.

Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respones to them, there were far more similarities than differences. (Well china was still worse, but not by as much as most USA people seem to think).

The biggest difference in USA and china at the moments is that in USA some Politicians still listen to people (if only mostly out of self interest)

If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of getting sent to mainland China to be imprisoned for decades, gang raped by cops in jail, and murdered while cops fake your suicide.

Only the latter two, but at least you won’t get sent to mainland China by us police.

Regarding the reality distortion fields of Phox Noise and friends, what makes you think the news you get from the HK protesters are any different? Furthermore, please explain why the cameras were off when Jeffrey Epstein died? And the autopsy has been... err 'inconclusive'?

I think you could take the FBI's very different approach towards Ghislaine Maxwell as evidence that while the Epstein result was... questionable, there is some amount of vested interest in not just disappearing the related actors. Occam's razor, etc.

That remains to be seen.

But the FBI has been trained to hide the source of information, probably because it is illegal in many cases (maybe comes from NSA)... they call it parallel construction but it probably should be called something much worst.

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

So in the end they only convict people based on legally permissible evidence that shows they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? How horrible.

No that is not what it means

> here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it

Ask those who wanted to protest against recent disproportionate police actions and those who did and became targets.

I see hundreds if not thousands people protesting and those of them who do not engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems. In fact, a lot of those who do engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems either - even if those are arrested, which happens very rarely, they are frequently released on the spot, and the charges are dropped. Only a handful of hardcore repeated offenders are even detained and charged. And with conviction and prosecution it remains to be seen if it ever happens even for most prominent and well-documented cases.

> One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out.

"All the stuff" that was either started or expanded while he was VP. Yeah, sure he wants to tear it down.

> One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out.

Biden is not going to change anything NSA-related, do not delude yourself and do not mistake electioneering frenzy for policy.

Under Biden's vice presidency, the NSA's collection of Americans' data reduced. Email metadata collection stopped in 2010 before the Snowden leaks, and phone metadata collection reduced after.

He seems consistent on this issue. Prior to his stint as VP, he complained about metadata collection by the GWB administration. https://youtu.be/h2qgU8kJt-0

Of course he complained about data collection by the administration his political enemies are running. The question is what happened when he was running it. So far you said "reduced" - reduced how? PRISM still exists, doesn't it? And there are many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_survei...

So the question is not whether Joe Biden ever grandstanded on the topic - I'm sure he did, as every politician would. The question is what he had done about it when he was Senator and VP - specific actions attributable to him? Because if he has been consistent to paying lip service to the issue while not doing anything in practice - it is prudent to expect the same consistency to extend into the future.

> reduced how?

I told you in the GP post. The email metadata program was shut down, and the phone metadata collection was reduced.

> PRISM still exists,

PRISM does not collect Americans' data.

> The question is what he had done about it when he was Senator and VP - specific actions attributable to him?

Again, I told that to you.

Which email metadata program specifically, how you know Biden personally had anything to do with shutting it down and how do you know there's no other programs such as Room 641A, MUSCULAR, etc. that can do the same? Same for phone metadata - what Biden had to do with it and how do we know it actually was reduced and not just changed codename?

You haven't told me anything in fact except that some things supposedly happened while Biden was a VP.

> Which email metadata program specifically

There was only one in the leaks. That one.

> how do you know there's no other programs

If there were any, Snowden would have leaked those instead of a program that had already been shut down.

> how do we know it actually was reduced and not just changed codename?

Because laws were changed, and oversight was added that showed how many metadata records the NSA requested from the telcos.

> how you know Biden personally had anything to do with shutting it down

Does it matter if he was personally in charge or if he delegated? Collection of Americans'metadata shrunk while he was VP.

> you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.

Living in Europe I have the pleasure of hearing these kinds of naive comparisons on a regular basis. Somehow it's always "the US is basically China and/or Saudi Arabia".

It's exhausting having to explain to people who are seemingly only capable of operating with a binary black and white worldview that there is a massive difference between certain shades of grey.

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