This is sometimes done on purpose:
> The Overton Window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. Politicians can only act within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton Window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones within the window, seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.
China dealt with the pandemic swiftly and decisively and life is getting back to normal there now. Meanwhile, the West had months of warning and vast majority of the governments chose to do nothing. Instead of stocking up on supplies and preparing the public the officials and the media called Chinese lockdowns authoritarian and played down the severity of the problem until thousands of people started dying. Our governments chose to protect business interests and to sacrifice the public for the sake of the profits.
The pandemic is just a small preview of what we can expect to happen with climate change in the coming decade.
Security services always demand total access to communications. It requires constant democratic pushback.
USA has been doing it as long as the second war started and never stopped.
And they consider strong encryption a weapon.
Are you familiar with the Zimmermann case?
However the Netherlands is a fairly honest country when it comes to statistics, so I wouldn't be surprised that the US still came out on top, but they just didn't report most of their taps for 'national security' reasons.
But something has really changed in the past 20-30 years. Before this there was no way to literally monitor everyone. It was too labour/storage intensive. You really had to be a 'person of interest' for some kind of (usually legitimate) reason.
Whereas now in this digital age (and with everyone carrying a portable listening device in their pocket) this is totally feasible and thanks to Snowden we know it's actually being done too.
The DDR did it
Another important factor is that until 20-30 years ago people communicated a lot less
They mostly talked face to face
The challenge today is not easier: to literally monitor everyone is not possible, the signal to noise ratio is too high
They could listen to everyone, it's doubtful it is possible to extract any meaningful information on random communications between random people that are not being monitored because they are already of interest
As someone else said metadata is more important because it allows to create connections between actors from thin air. When you have narrowed the scope, listening becomes a lot more effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
No, there's really no comparison.
A justice system, with reasonable information to infer a crime, seeking a warrant, using rules and regulations that have integrity, oversight, sanctioned by a Judge, following specific rules of access with certain, proportional criteria - is nothing like 'China'.
In fact, we are already subject to that, everywhere in Europe, just not your messaging apps.
It is not totalitarian whatsoever - there is just the risk of totalitarianism creeping in. A risk, which quite frankly is overstated. There is almost zero material harm that comes to innocent individuals as a result of these policies in states with lawful civic infrastructure. There can be, but it's rare and again, the 'problem' is more expansive and that an authoritarian takes power and uses the system for unlawful purposes.
China does not have an independent legal system, or much concern for human rights. The CCP uses these things to censor every day speech on a variety of topics - even for the most innocuous things like comparing Xi to 'Winnie the Pooh' let alone for discussing things like Tibet, Hong Kong, or Taiwan privately.
The CPP uses these controls as an 'total and complete information and thought control system' that interjects into every aspect of life. If you talk bad about Xi on your 'chat'- that will literally go on your file. It could affect your credit, promotional opportunities, how the justice system treats you etc..
They have successfully suppressed and controlled dialogue on a variety of issues - this system is frankly the CCP's most powerful means of control, far more so than anything physical like the 'police' or the 'army'.
Western governments want to use it to go after people making bombs, sex traffickers, and tax evaders. There is no chance that the German government is going to send police to your house because you said 'Angela Merkel is a clown and needs to go!' to your buddy on WeChat. There is a chance some future government could to it, for the wrong reasons, and that's cause for come concern, but it's not pragmaticaly the issue.
LMFAO imagine saying that with a straight face in 2020 when US nabs people off the street in unmarked vans, and the judicial branch is staffed by political partisans actively working withe the republican party to steal the election.
You sweet summer child.
I would expect from the greatest democracy and country in the World to be in the top three, not a little bit better than those at the bottom
Can you name one which isn't already bad?
Like, I don't know, Spain? Germany? Argentina? South Africa?
The greatest democracy and country in the World shouldn't even be in the same business of North Korea style
And yet...
How many countries NK invaded?
How many coup d'état that established long and painful military dictatorships around the World it supported and/or financed?
At least nobody calls NK the greatest democracy and country in the world or the land of the free...
Never mind Apples and Oranges, you’re comparing a rabid kitten (NK: you don’t want to be a cell inside it, but the animal is containable) with a healthy chimpanzee in the jungle you’re walking though (USA: violent and acts like it owns the place, so being one of its cells is safer than being a cell in many of the things around it).
Looks like the chimpanzee cells are not safer after all.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/intentional-homicides-per...
Homicide rates from firearms NK (0.11 / 100k)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...
Homicide rate in USA (6.1 / 100k)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate?tab=chart&s...
Homicide rates from firearms USA (4.63 / 100k)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...
So USA is more dangerous than NK in general and the chances of getting shot and killed (quoting "Can you criticise the government without you and your family being shot?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032711) are 42 times worse in USA than in NK.
It means that for every person shot and killed in NK there are 42 in USA.
I was wrong anyway, it's not 6 chances in 1 million but ~1 chance in a million to get shot and killed in NK.
Compare it now to some other western country, for example Italy, my country:
homicide rate: 0.7 / 100k
homicide rate by firearms: 0.3 / 100k
Italy is quite average for the west, all the other western countries have similar stats, more or less.
What's wrong with the US?
Yeah, no. The figure here would be for those executed by the state for political crimes, though that will be hard to measure in both cases and I’d prefer to include in that count things like “unlawfully killed by cops who didn’t like you because you uncovered evidence of systematic racism” because I feel de-facto truths are more important than de-jure claims.
Then you get messy things like prison labour, and systematic policies of punishing entire communities for crimes (or protests) of a few from that community, and I don’t even know if you’re able to demonstrate any of these without being piled on by people defending any given example as unrelated/justified/propaganda/all of the above.
In fairness to you, this is a lot messier than my original comment. :)
Regardless of the motivation USA is more dangerous than Somalia (4.31/100k) - of course there are other reasons to be scared there,being killed is only one among many - but still it is kinda bad IMO.
If we count, for example, people killed by the police, there have been 1,004 killings in USA in 2019, 3 every million, 34 every 10 million residents. compared to Germany, whose police is said to be quite violent, it's 30 times more (Germany is around 1 per 10 million residents) and 170 times worse than Japan (0.2 per 10 millions)
All in all, as much as I know numbers don't tell the whole truth, something needs to change over there .
After all, many people there won't have access to such technology. They'll be off the grid unlike most of us.
Of course that doesn't actually give them privacy, I'm sure that there's plenty of 'friendly' neighbours spying on each other for a few bucks, basically stasi style.
And also this watermarking isn't all that different from our browser fingerprinting and mega data collection. It's just a cultural difference. The NK government wants their citizens to know they're being spied on. Whereas ours is trying to hide it. Thus more focus on the endpoint device rather than the cloud side.
So it’s really not a surprise that the idea of banning encryption is on the table.
So encryption as a basic human right sounds like the way to fight this.
I’ve personally witnessed “we don’t like how Corona is being handled” marches here in Berlin.
The difference is massive.
The concern for how Corona is handled in Europe, is that the temporary measures for dealing with Corona become permanent.
In Denmark these temporary measures are supposed to expire in March 2021, but it’s anyone’s guess if that arrangement is honored by the government.
Watching police brutality in countries like France does not give me that impression in the slightest.