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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

I have been studying Chinese for 7 years. Many of my Chinese friends live in Los Angeles and WeChat is central in their life... Getting a job, taking orders, doing all kinds of business, paying for things. They don't know the phone numbers of their friends. Many don't speak English or their English is not very good. If it is completely cut off they will still find ways to communicate but arguably it will be more likely to create new ways for scammers to take advantage of people. I think it is possible to ban WeclChat, but there needs to be a well thought out plan.

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They can do what all expats in China already need to do to access facebook, google, gmail, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, etc: use a vpn.

Just to be clear, the USA doesn’t have the infrastructure or legal framework in place to actually block internet traffic. The best they can do is remove DNS entries.

They could block WeChat from app stores, which would basically be fatal. Especially for iPhone users, who don't even have the option to sideload without jailbreaking.

This is an interesting argument against walled gardens I don't often see: that it gives your government an easy chokepoint to prevent users from using software it doesn't like.

Facebook is not listed on the Chinese App Store, but you can install it easily by switching your region to the USA, installing Facebook, and then switching your region back to China, without losing apps from either region. (I know this because I owned an iPhone while living in China)

Much easier than having to bother with a VPN, and many Chinese people are already used to jumping through such hoops.

China puts up with it for whatever reason, but the US doesn't have to. The US can just as easily order Apple and Google to remove it from every region of every app store.

They can’t actually do that. There are good reasons apples Chinese App Store is run by their Chinese subsidiary. That would be like China ordering Apple to remove Facebook from their American App Store.

I've read somewhere that they can force the ISPs to ban wechat traffic? I'm not in IT so is this just complete hogwash?

They really can’t. They would need some kind of firewall to do it, and ISPs simply aren’t setup for that. They can’t even ban child porn sites effectively (instead the police must rely on catching viewers of such and shutting down sites physically if possible).

Indian government frequently does this, so technically it's possible even with multiple ISPs in a big country.

Must feel good to say China's getting what they deserve but it's the ordinary people who are suffering the most. The ban is a victory to no one, and just shows the US is the copycat this time around.

Their usage of wechat is more likely a liability than a benefit. It gives a foreign adversary visibility into their activities in US. How can they become activist or work for change if their government is monitoring everything they say?

Do the Hong Kong protest crackdown not scare anyone else?

Now they have an excuse. It won’t look suspicious if they communicate to each other on channels that can’t be monitored by their oppressive government.

Why are you assuming an average Chinese citizen would want to be an activist or work for change? Most likely they have positive views of their government just like the average American citizen.

Your arguments is the NSA should monitor them, just as it does us?

How did you gather that from their comment?

Will the NSA make HK protesters disappear?

There’s great alternatives to wechat that are secure by design, rather than spy-by-design, such as telegram or signal.

That should be for the users to decide. My point is whatever they choose is likely going to be government monitored.

And the US has done hundred of renditions without trial, so while far from the scale of China, US spy agencies still do some awful things.

> My point is whatever they choose is likely going to be government monitored.

And _their_ point, which came first and you came here to argue against, is CCP monitoring is especially bad for particular political reasons.

I’m fine with the CCP monitoring cat videos.

Those are valid concerns. I also think the opposite side of that coin is worth considering. That is to say, should we allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil or should we minimize total damage by cutting it off now instead of later?

As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

You really need to explain your point more thoroughly.

- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?

- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done

- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Google employees being fans of the person who lost the Presidential election doesn't make Google a cheerleader for the government.

Google was an active collaborator with the state, on not just intelligence gathering but on soft-power influence-pushing (according to that article).

Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.

The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.

The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.

Yes. A ban now will be less disruptive than a ban later when WeChat has far more American users. The damage I refer to is the damage to to the lives and habits of WeChat's current American and immigrant users caused by WeChat's removal.

> Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!

For a long time, USPS was directly controlled by government, yet was also one of the only ways for people to communicate long distance. Government could easily have made laws like "we will read all your mail", or "we won't deliver mail to political enemies".

Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?

> Yet that didn't happen

The USPS did do exactly that. Read about how abolitionists attempted to spread anti-slavery literature through the federal postal system in the antebellum era, and how the post office decided it would suppress those mailings for being supposedly insurrectionary.

A counterpoint is that the telephone infrastructure has been tapped by the US government to monitor even citizens conversations. My opinion is that since it requires fewer people it is easier to do. I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing like the US seems to

> I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing

If you ask a random Chinese citizen "are you okay with the government listening in to your phone calls?", most people would say Yes. Having the government listen in and having government presence on the streets makes us feel safe, because most of us trust our government. Sure, it has it's issues, but in general, the government acts in our favor, and without it we'd have far lower standards of living.

The US is a total polar opposite in this regard.

That random Chinese citizen is afraid to say no, and assuming you will report them.

If they are against it, then yes they may likely say no out of fear. But make no mistake, many are for it. Not everyone shares the same values we do in America.

How many Chinese have you had intimate conversations with about this?

This is one really important counterpoint. The internet made it more economical.

Another is that in days before the internet, the technology for small numbers of people to cause mass violence did not exist.

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

But also, the government in the 19th century was much weaker than it became in the 20th and now 21st centuries.

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