This is detracting from the fact that we have an actively hostile actor with a huge platform here in our country, and that needs to be handled as soon as possible.
I totally support broad regulation of privacy law. TikTok is a much deeper concern. I don't like seeing a good cause used to distract from another good cause.
the FBI has the power to put me in a cage, China does not... I am confused as why china is a bigger threat to me personally than the FBI?
CIA and FBI are very big threats to you, which is why you vote regularly to ensure that your rights are represented and those agencies aren't able to abuse their power.
China is a much more distant and abstract, but much more serious threat.
If the FBI or CIA fucks up, they will put let's say 10% of people in prison for opposition to the state.
If China is allowed to gain upper hands on the United States, it will result in broad scale societal problems which I couldn't even begin to estimate. Imagine a world where Russia is allowed to take Europe. Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded and our chip supply is shut down.
They are very different threats, and should be treated very differently. The FBI and CIA are immune system type systems, where China is a guy with a knife.
The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak. China is a fully rogue actor with no balancing systems to prevent it from damaging our society.
Both can kill you, both will kill you if given the opportunity. You shouldn't worry not about the guy with a knife because your immune system can kill you in 5 minutes if it wanted to. You should worry about both.
That never works out in practice as the administrative state (which includes the FBI and CIA) are soo far removed from representative government they are basically unaccountable at this point, that is with out even getting into the idea that 1 vote in a nation of 350 million plus holds no real power anyway, or the problems with First past the post, or countless other topics around voting
"Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice
>>Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded
I think we already live in such a world.
>>The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak.
Do they? In any real sense? We have confirmed and rumored massive violations of constitutional rights both here and abroad yet there is no accountability. From the Torture report, to massive violation of 4th amendment via "parallel construction" to even the possibility of actual assassinations..
Who exactly are they accountable to? it is certainly not the people, or the constitution
I had a much larger post, but I'm going to only respond to this one now, because it sums up basically off the disagreements and no further discussion is going to resolve anything.
I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.
What data do you have to support the position that "democracy ultimately is still doing its job. " further what "job" do you believe democracy is doing.
I can point to many data points that show it is not, the for mentioned lack of accountability. The fact that most of the voting population does not even vote. I can point to research studies like that from political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Paige [1] that shows Average citizens have little impact on public policy. I have all kinds of data, and clear examples in history to support my position, I would be interested in seeing a counter offer
[1] https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-...
Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished? Have you seen the same, but on democratic countries?
That should answer it.
Now you could argue that he still did a good thing, and perhaps that would have been taken into account by the jury in what would have been a proper trial in a civilian court had he not left the country.
None of the journalists who reported on those leaks were imprisoned or harmed. In fact, those on beats that require them to have accreditation to the White House, Pentagon, etc still have that accreditation.
This is fundamentally and vastly different to what happens to journalists in China, Russia, and similarly authoritarian states.
"National Security" is often used to cover up government abuse, the public only knows of a few rare instances of this abuse and based on those I can pretty much assume the abuses are FAR FAR more extensive than has been reveled to the public and there is great incentive by government to classify everything to ensure there is never any accountability. Just look at the actions around these JFK files that multiple administrations have tried to declassify, or the Torture report that clearly the CIA violated the law even during the investigation
You must have immense trust, not backed by any rational data to support that trust, to proclaim Snowden an enemy of the people simply because he violated state secrets laws, laws that IMO should be unconstitutional in the first place, and are completely antithetical to a functional democracy.
If the government can keep secrets from the voters, then the voters can not hold them accountable, it is as simple as that
> perhaps the illusion not actually being an illusion is what keeps it alive
After Glenn Greenwald reported on the 2013 leaks, the IC and news media started up a bunch of threats of treason and were questioning his status as a journalist (to make him more legally at fault)
This doesn't necessarily contradict your statement, given we state the obvious that the US govt (and executive agencies especially) are not democratic
You mean like Kashoggi, right?
Is it tho? Is it worse than Cisco or bcci? What about CryptoAG? Instagram and Meta literary have got shadow profiles on near every single person on the planet....
I'm sure the us would love an EU/UK with private health care and weaker unions and labor laws.
Democracy is good, yes, but blindly asserting that USA == democracy is an incredibly naive, elementary school textbook level take of how our society propagates itself (not saying you're asserting this, but addressing the hypothetical point)
It's rocket fuel for demagogues, who swoop in and exploit it and turbocharge it even more (see Trump). They say the old system isn't working, they promise to disrupt it. The old rules aren't working anymore, give me all the power, I alone can fix it.
There are documented examples of FBI killings of dissident citizens (e.g. Fred Hampton). This is not even a "possibility".
Democracy is a system that ensures that whoever has the actual power also holds the formal power.
The only direct result of this is that it makes revolutions unnecessary. But indirectly, it also makes revolution-like changes much more common, what is really great.
What democracy isn't is a system that empowers the small people, or that removes power imbalances, or whatever propaganda you've got. There are many visible false features about it that lots of people believe. But that doesn't mean it's a bad system, it's the best we currently know about.
Like him or not, Trump was very much not the preference of those in power, and very much was the preference of many people in America. That shows the people do have power.
An aberration shows your rule is not actually a rule. Trump is also not the only time this happened. FDR also bucked the trend.
The primary strength of democracy is removing people that mistreat us, and it is a real power in a properly run democracy. Lose that power, and democracy dies.
I do generally agree voters have little influence on policy.
Russia can not even 'take' Ukraine the chances of it being able to take Europe are zero at this point.
I don't want to totally discredit Ukraine here, but there is a world where without American support Russia would be having a much easier time.
For example, according to the US military (See The West Point Military History of the Second World War which is available on Kindle), without US support, WW2 would have lasted 1-2 years longer but the Soviets could have defeated Germany all on their own, both without lend/lease and also without any US involvement at all in the war on Europe. Here is what the West Point history says at the start of their section on Lend/Lease:
"Although nearly half the population and the great industrial regions of the Donets remained under German occupation, the Soviets still found men for new armies and vastly increased war production. They defeated the Germans at Stalingrad almost entirely through their own efforts and would probably have won the same victory if they received no assistance at all."
Or you can read When Titans Clashed by noted British historian David Glantz, which reads
"If the Western Allies had not provided equipment and invaded Northwest Europe, Stalin and his commanders would have taken twelve to eighteen months to finish off the Wehrmacht. The results would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers would have waded at France's Atlantic beaches rather than meeting the Allies at the Elbe".
It is sad that many in the West don't know that 80% of German war deaths were at the hands of Soviet soldiers.
The reason why historians believe this is because of the timing. The vast majority of Lend/Lease aid was delivered in 1945. Only 20% of aid was delivered before 1944 to the Soviets, but by that time the tide had already turned (Stalingrad, recognized as the turning point, was in winter of 1942 to the start of 1943). By the time Lend/Lease really took off, the Soviet army was already vastly larger and more capable than the German army, which was in full retreat. During the dark days of 1941 and 1942, Lend/Lease was miniscule, primarily consisting of things like cans of spam and beans. The Soviets derisively called Spam "The Second Front", because instead of delivering the promised second front, they received cans of spam in small quantities during the darkest period of the war for the Russians in 1941-1942.
The massive factories and military gear were sent after the Germans were retreating, and therefore most historians believe they had the effect of speeding up the collapse of the German forces, which was the main effect of the Normandy invasion as well.
I mean, it's not even close. And the Soviet Union, with enormous quantities of oil, iron ore, and other raw materials, could mass produce tanks, planes, and heavy weapons in massive quantities.
This was why Stalingrad was so important -- it was the gate to the Soviet Oil fields, and once that gate was closed, the war was basically over. Had Germany been able to capture the Caucauses, one could argue that the USSR would be starved of energy and so dependent on the US or some other nation to supply it. But that never happened.
It's a different story if you are a Chinese national in the US, have family in China, are reporting on China, etc. But for most Americans it probably matters more if Google is sharing your info with various three-letter agencies.
This analogy is great, because it's a better analogy than you think. Immune issues kill a LOT more people than knife attacks in the USA every year. In general, external enemies are less dangerous than internal enemies. It's easy to rally people against an external enemy (see the Robbers Cave Experiment in psychology), but much harder to rally people against an internal enemy.
There are 0.60 knife deaths per 100k people in the USA. [1] There are 3.97 deaths for SAID per 100k [2], and that's just the first type of autoimmune issue that I googled for off the top of my head.
Rome faced plenty of external enemies over the years, what actually caused the fall of Rome was internal.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-.... [2] https://academic.oup.com/rheumatology/article/60/3/1321/5908...
When there are 100 million Americas with 100 million CIAs and all governments are ruled under a common government that makes all knife stabbings and war illegal, that maybe something that is the truth in geopolitics as well.
Until then, this isn't an analogy that works very well.
Never worked, will never work. Big people/elites will always have access to every data. The pretext will be "National Security" or "Children". It is like baptist vs bootleggers, so voting won't solve the problem.
When You're Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression. The world doesn't need to imagine, because we had to stand by while the US launched illegal wars in Iraq, continues the unjust economic sanctions on Cuba just just for election politics, or all the shenigans the CIA pulled in South America in the previous decades. Heck just this month the US has said it will ignore a WTO ruling[1] just because it says so and everyone will have to stand by.
The multipolar world threatens Americans so much because they'll finally have to live like there's another version of themselves in the world.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-12-12/supply...
The US government have behaved like absolute shitheels for much of the Cold War and beyond.
That being said, they have a relatively free press and relatively fair and liberal laws, especially compared to China.
Haven’t the Twitter files proven unequivocally that is not true?
I agree that we should worry about both. I’m honestly unsure which of the two is a greater threat.
Considering the director of the NSA lied to congress about what they were doing and got away with it, I'm not sure we should be putting much faith in any checks or assuming the balance of three letter agencies.
I guess most Americans aren’t very scared of the feds “because they have nothing to hide”, which as we know is a false sense of security in any surveillance state. But it can still be true that you have /more/ to fear from the government of China, given that they can have economic impact on your life at a macro level.
My goal is to live my life free from abuse, coercion, and infringement of my natural rights as a living human
the governments goal (be it china or US) is power, and control via the exclusive authority to initiate violence on the people with in the sphere of influence
I do not share any goals with government.
I take it you’re not a huge fan of the US constitution?
TikTok is toxic trash for many reason well beyond its connection to China
Either way, I'm not getting an objective education.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/19/conservati...
That fear is from tv using it so often it seems true.
What does the average American need to fear about China? Very little in terms of impact to daily lives.
What does the average American need to fear about being secretly recorded by a neighbour? Very little.. they still think its creepy
The FBI has at least some kind of supervision, from elected officials who ultimately answer to their constituents. That's a long way from a guarantee, but it's more than nothing, which is what you have on China.
China can't (legitimately) put you in a cage, but they can do a lot of other things to make you really unhappy, and there's nothing you can do about it. Whether that nets out to be more or less scary is up to you, but there is a difference on which to make the distinction.
Me, I'm not really so sure that this app represents all that big a threat compared to all of the other things. My concerns are more with the intermediate: large corporations without the power to put me in a cage but with the power to do a lot of other bad things. Including just plain losing my info by accident, something neither the FBI nor China is likely to do.
There is no disadvantage to a US resident from stopping them from spying on US residents. Both the law-and-order type of US voter and the don't-tread-on-me type agree on that.
It has stopped the CIA from installing their own government, no?
- Students have had family members back in China threatened with imprisonment for merely attending protests.
- Journalists have been kidnapped and are still missing.
- Other individuals have been monitored by local embassy staff.
- Businesses have seen markets arbitrarily cut-off for any form of criticism.
Just because you have not been personally threatened doesn't mean others haven't.
Would be a shame if their youthful TikTok private videos and DMs happened to be leaked to the press. Unless…
If you ran an intelligence service, you might want to identify targets, prioritize targets, and potentially create a graph of social connections.
Tiktok provides picture data (geolocation, timestamps, hashes, potentially facial recognition and OCR), location data, time data (hours app is opened), private message data, and data on hobbies/interests, I assume there is profile and private message data as well.
That's all without bringing up the glaring problem which is damaging institutional trust. Promoting anti-science videos or showing one group very pro videos and another group very against videos is damaging to our very social fabric. Amplifying things that feel intuitive but aren't correct is dangerous.
The threat model you perceive is that our authoritarian government would oppress us. The threat model that is happening is that external governments are causing chaos within our borders, amplifying division, and sewing distrust.
You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
> I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
Who has the motive and opportunity to do things that screw over regular folks? It's a lot easier to think of cases where the CIA has something to gain by keeping someone in or out of jail who shouldn't be, or routing money or weapons somewhere they shouldn't be, than where China does. Low-level disruption would be a poor use of their assets that's not worth the risk. CIA employees have a lot more reason to be in zero-sum competition with regular Joes.
Can you give concrete examples of who the CIA would want to jail or not? Why do CIA employees lose when regular Joes gain and regular Joes gain when CIA employees lose?
Who decides who should or shouldn't be sent weapons. How informed do you think you are compared to the people who make the orders to route money or send weapons?
I am not a CIA lover by an means. At best the CIA supports countries like Ukraine and Taiwan. At worst CIA plays "realpolitik" and puts American interests, particularly those of Americas upper class/aristocrats, first.
What I mean is they're a lot more likely to be entangled with everyday life. Just a lot more chance to get mixed up with a senator who can send more budget their way, or even a local sheriff who asked too many questions about the permitting for something they were building, or hell, one of the guys who bullied the agent at school. The amount of people who can meaningfully influence something a PRC agent cares about is likely to be smaller, just because there's so much more domestic politics than international politics.
A TikTok that doesn't have the ability to do bad things isn't an issue. Focusing on TikTok pretends that it's the only hostile actor with a large platform in <country> that needs to be handled asap
You can handle Facebook and TikTok at the same time by putting in strong privacy regulations, along with all the other similar hostile actors
Even if you move all of their code and mandate that they have a shell company in the United States, and you mandate that none of American data ever goes to China, they can ignore you. You validate that every request only stays in the United States? How do you validate that there's no communication between the two systems?
The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can administrate code, but unless you actually build that code yourself and basically understand it from the ground up with every single update, which is going to be nearly impossible, it's going to be very easy to sneak features through.
The problem is, keeping this safe is going to be a herculan task, and we're just not up to it. Facebook is tame in comparison, because at the end of the day they're subject to our open media, transparency laws, corporate auditing, and all of that other fun stuff.
We can reasonably pass regulations that help keep Facebook in check.
We cannot reasonably pass regulations which we'll keep TikTok in check.
Contrary to the current American discourse, not everyone in China is a government bot.
Jack Ma is a good case study, one of the most influential and successful businesspeople in china, and he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like. There was no legal process, he just dropped off the grid completely, and then some time later the chinese government made ominous statements about how he was "embracing supervision."
No, it isn't. The idea of private companies existing to make money is exactly the same in China as everywhere else. Companies talk about serving the public good (as they do in the US as well), but they really just care about the bottom line.
> he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like
He wasn't thrown in jail. He was pressured to stop directly criticizing the government, after he publicly criticized China's financial regulators.
Right now, TikTok faces much greater political pressures from the US government than it does from the Chinese government. It's a private company trying to make money, and trying to avoid scrutiny from both the Chinese and the US governments.
No, not everyone in China is a state bot. However, every company has to keep at least a few party members on their board and obey state controls constantly.
Couldn't the same be said of companies here in the US? We know the government is collecting data from US corporations. Should other countries be blocking Google, Facebook and Microsoft?
Companies do cooperate with the government, but for the most part that cooperation is either voluntary, or clearly defined by law which mandates cooperation.
There is still some reason for concern, but there is much less reason for concern.
That's why the sudden concern about TikTok theoretically being a problem comes across as an excuse for going after yet another Chinese company, as a way to pressure China and hamper its development.
> The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can have auditing and whistleblowing on the US entity (and include a promise of asylum in the whistleblowing protection), and big fines if they ever send data offshore.
If you want to be more like china, you can ban them, but if you think that freedom is valuable, it's you who's losing out
[1] https://time.com/6139988/countries-where-twitter-facebook-ti...
I was going to say that if user is addicted to TikTok (or other hostile application) and also concerned about surveillance/tracking - they could use a dedicated burner phone with fake info, no contacts.
> I totally support broad regulation of privacy law.
I later read this from Wikipedia:
"As of January 2020, researches found that governments of 155 countries have been mandating SIM registration laws; in some countries, prepaid users must submit biometrics like photos and fingerprints."[0]
The system is broken...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepaid_mobile_phone#Privacy_r...
The reality is lots of people sell this data. If you shut down tiktok, the Chinese will go buy it or otherwise obtain it from one of them.
The real concern is the ability to use the website as a propaganda outlet
Can you clarify what you mean here? I realize people are unhappy with how Elon has run Twitter but who do you expect to do what?