[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
[2] https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7...
Similarly, they didn't overthrow Bolivia recently, but people think Elon did it personally to get cheaper lithium because he joked about it on Twitter once.
I mean, we know when they do it - nearly every domestic terrorist bombing/kidnapping attempt ends up being a group of one guy and 4 FBI informers as soon as the one guy asks how to make a bomb on Facebook.
downvoters - why are you downvoting this? Do you think it's false? Or just don't like hearing about it?
It's interesting to you that what the PRC is doing today reminds you of something the FBI did last century. But the discussion is still about the PRC, not the FBI.
As you can see, your comment that is benign on the surface started a whole thread of off-topic comments, which bogs down the overall discussion and generates more heat than light.
Or maybe people read what you wrote as yet another "what about..." comment, the likes of which always pop up like mushrooms after a rain in discussions about China's current-day misdeeds.
Spying was excused as a necessity, so how would I condemn these actions in the first place? "Whataboutism" is an ethical argument but we are not talking about ethics in the context of spying at all.
An argument can also be made how it adds context, to properly frame these actions in the reality we live in.
Insisting on looking at this in total isolation, like it's this thing that only happens in that one particular place, completely belittles how and why these practices become established and normalized in the first place.
Because state organized suppression of perceived political dissidence is not unique to China, it has a long history all over the globe and takes many different forms to this day [0].
Recognizing and acknowledging that is a much more fitting approach to Hacker News than going; "This is a submission about China, only talking badly about China allowed in here!", which only results in the same kind of "circle jerk" discussions that already dominate too much of Reddit.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...
Not what-about-ism: You are right! And here is another example in support of your point!
BOSTON – Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Grassley
I have no idea if Chuck Grassley had anything to do with that, but my point is that if the same people in Congress then are still in Congress today, you can't claim a clean break from the past due to the passage of time.
Surely they aren't during stuff like that, and "thwarting" "terrorist plots" where the "conspirators" are FBI assets themselves
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-internationa...
impossible to know how many such stories there are
But there's not a ton of reason to believe that things have changed so fundamentally.
> One client was Bank of America, who hired Hunton and Williams to launch a campaign against Wikileaks. At some point the list of targets was expanded to various other supporters of Wikileaks such as journalist Glenn Greenwald. The other client so far revealed was the Chamber of Commerce, which wished to target labor unions and a shockingly long list of their supporters.
> The main tool of attack would be the use of the Palantir technology to analyze the network of support for the targets.
Source: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/02/13/943139/-HBGary:-...
The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities never properly followed up on that incident. In 2011 it asked the DoD and NSA to provide any contracts with HBGary, Palantir and Berico, but as far as I can tell that never ended up happening, the whole thing was just buried over time and forgotten.
and 00s/10s (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-d...)
But they SURELY have changed in 2020s!
How weird.
I think one difference is we did have the Church commission so at least there is some amount of accountability although it could have been better whilst in PRC there will be no such inquiry into these sorts of things.