Same could be said for countries outside of the USA buying US tech equipment.
Consider that your country is likely either already a five eyes member, or a "five eyes plus" member with a historical record going back 45+ years of intelligence/law enforcement data sharing between the various NATO governments' intelligence agencies.
And take a risk calculation, based on what you're doing in your life, if all your metadata and traffic was in the hands of the NSA, what's the most likely end result that might affect you adversely?
Are you actually at risk of being persecuted for anything you're doing socially, religiously, politically? For instance, if you're a German, is all of your data being in the hands of the BND going to result in anything bad happening to you?
I really don't think that's unreasonable, the fall of the berlin wall was within living memory. I hope that the NSA isn't going to do anything too, but the idea that they can't or won't is clearly not true. Staying under the radar might feel pragmatic, but I think a lot of people realize that's entirely inadequate with constantly shifting political environments.
The simple fact that this explanation can exist and is somewhat commonly agreed by tech-savvy people is... disturbing in some way.
I mean, underlying are freedom, rights, security, surveillance, But also geopolitics, economics, philosophy maybe.
Just behind some daily tech.
The paradox of tolerance and an open society is that if you allow actual fascism to flourish (and Le Pen is absolutely a fascist, in my opinion), you risk ending up with something much worse in the long run.
"oh no, won't somebody please think of the unfortunate oppressed fascists!..
The latest version of "terrorist", "activist" or "heretic".
and Le Pen is absolutely a fascist, in my opinion
Consider this - If a "fascist" is democratically elected, what wins: anti-fascism (presumably from the perspective of an opposing 3rd party, as Le Pen doesn't describe herself as a fascist); or democracy?
so you say "if you allow actual fascism to flourish.. something much worse in the long run" - who gets to decide what is "allowed", and what isn't?
Seems to me the basis for such stability would have nothing to do with subjective judgements of what constitutes "fascism" - and more to do with principles of democracy - i.e. a fascist entity can be democratically elected - it just can't be given powers that would allow it to override democracy, or escape legal oversight. Perhaps the key word is "extralegal"?
The problem is that too many political entities (not just far-right) seek extralegal, overreaching powers; believing it OK so long as "they can be trusted"; but if the king of today is a good king, his heir might still be bad. And the good government that allows for overreach enables the bad government that does the same.
This actually happened in recent history. Just because Hitler (and yes I must unfortunately rely on such a reference, and no, Le Pen is not Hitler, but it provides a good example of far-right vs democracy) was elected doesn't mean the entire world should roll over.
The election of the Nazis didn't justify the sweeping power transfer that resulted, including control of the press, a private party militia (Brownshirts) etc etc etc
I'm criticising efforts to interfere with who is allowed to be elected, versus limiting what powers can be obtained through election.
Remember when this was the other way around? How did we come to this in ~two decades?
I have no idea whether it's equally bad at Google/Android or Apple. I have the feeling it's not.
I don't think China really dominates in software world-wide. Xiaomi seems more like an exception to me. Hardware is a different story.
For us that don't live in the US or China, it is just a matter of choosing between two evils. And in being pragmatics, the 90% of the population outside of China and the US does not give a damn if the US or China are spying in their mundane conversations.
You recall incorrectly. By extension of the First Amendment, US companies are protected from being forced to introduce functionality so as to collect or decrypt information (or for any other purpose). Carrying out original work for the government is considered to be speech, and as a result cannot be compelled. If the data is already collected and available in a decrypted form to the company a court order can compel the data to be turned over as evidence, as is the case with any data (or any thing) held by anyone (with narrow exceptions related to the 5th amendment).
This was a topic of national attention several years ago when the FBI tried (and failed) to compel Apple to create and sign a custom software update to unlock an iPhone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute
Given the choice, I'd choose Cisco every day of the week. It's not perfect but then again there's no such thing as perfect security.
With an E2E messenger, you can be sure that most likely your communications are not being intercepted. With a Chinese company, your communications are never secure.
Not only are Chinese software products not secure, but they'll lie to you about their security. Zoom claimed to have E2E encryption on calls which turned out to be an egregious fabrication (on top of them exporting calls to Chinese servers).