Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Make no mistake - western governments are envious of the spying tools that China has. Our freedoms are in spite of central government and thanks to an independent judiciary and wise founders. Some like Trudeau have even explicitly expressed admiration for the flexibility of the Chinese dictatorship. FBI, CIA, etc. would never decline to use the types of tools that China has.

View on HN

The actual quote:

> There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.

I don't think that's wrong? Although it is certainly in bad taste for a prime minister.

> There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.

It's wrong, too - the Chinese economy is in trouble, and has been since Covid. Xi has accumulated more autocratic power, but if he's able to use it to "turn their economy around on a dime" then he's not doing so.

I don't disagree, but the quote is from 10 years ago. Long before COVID.

On the contrary, I’m not sure that those big government interventions have often worked out. There may have been a grain of truth to what the libertarians have been saying all along. What have we gotten for our interventions? Wildly bloated asset prices? A younger generation that can’t afford a home?

nit: You don't have to be a libertarian to be opposed to government interfering with market dynamics, when its not for explicit safety (i.e. FDA, EPA, etc).

Of course that’s bad. You cant justify dictatorships with good intentions.

I missed the part where he said the Chinese did good at X therefore dictatorship’s must be amazeballs!

Leave room for nuance and discussion.

What about with good outcomes?

"The King is happy on his Throne, and the people are pleased" obviously winning in battle is a good outcome, since your enemies are now dead or slaved.

"Rome demands victory from her Generals" .. and those who tried and failed, were publicly killed. As they still do in China actually.

we can do better than this

I’m not sure Romans really did that.

What about a poster of good outcomes in front of a dystopia?

If some of those ever manifest themselves, I may reconsider.

What do you mean, envious? I thought it was long since established that the US does the same to their so called citizens.

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

You don't think China has and uses tools that the US can't? That they're at the same level?

I'm a major fan/paying contributor to the EFF, but that seems absurd to me. We don't have to equate the US with China in order to say the US is doing terrible things and needs to stop. In fact doing so just distracts from the issue by changing it into an argument about something else.

The US intelligence agencies is literally copying all the traffic from every US citizen(except maybe if you're some elite sorcerer wizard hacker) in real time and have been doing so for almost two decades. They have the same capabilities as China.

And yes, the US and China are not the same. But they both have the same capabilities. Parent poster argued that the Chinese government had a greater capacity to spy on their citizens("better tools"). I simply pointed out that it's false.

IIRC it was just the metadata (which is still a very big deal ftr) not all the bytes. Also you would have to believe that they have compromised AES/RSA/etc in order to break the encryption.

China also has a lot more surveillance and filtering controls, especially with traffic leaving/entering the great firewall. They have the social credit system and things as well, which the US could have with credit card and banking information, but (at least for now) the US has to get a warrant whereas the Chinese just gobble all of it up. That's probably moot though since the banks will store that info forever so a warrant can be gotten later. Anyway we could debate whether those are "tools" or not. But overall I'd bet we agree on the vast majority of things. Even if I think you're being a bit hyperbolic, it always makes me happy to see other people passionate about this topic, so thank you!

And here I was thinking I wasn’t hyperbolic enough! Have a nice day

FBI, CIA, etc. would never decline to use the types of tools that China has.

That's just the kind of overheated hyperbole derailing so many of our civic discussions nowadays.

FBI and CIA have far more effective tools at their disposal. They'd nearly always decline to use the journeyman tools China has in its cyber arsenal.

The US government has all the same tools, they’re just called “tech companies” and state doesn’t administer them directly for the sake of appearances.

Make no mistake - the US state has these tools as well. They just let the tech companies do most of their dirty work.

With all of china's spying you guys are terrible at building things effectively. I wonder what the US will do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com