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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

1) The activities of the US gov't have precisely nothing to do with the probability that a device from China has some backdoor or surveillance function. When someone raises this concern, the response "the USA has a history of surveiling its citizens" is not a rebuttal, it's irrelevant. Thus a whataboutism.

2) Your burden of proof might be different from mine, but one needs to be pretty naive to think that the CCP doesn't surveil western citizens. I doubt their intelligence apparatus is that bad at their job. In fact, I have plenty of reason to believe it's pretty great at it.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-chinese-communist-party-us...

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/27/china-ccp-spying-us-pol...

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1) of course it does. This is an information cold war. If participant 1 is doing something then participant 2 is forced to do at least the same thing so as to ensure they don't fall behind. It's very naive to not expect the actions of one state to not affect the actions of the other.

you either intentionally or unintentionally phrased it in a way that blames unnamed participant 1. And given the context of this conversation, it seems that you blame US for CCP's inevitable spying. Seems weird given the kind of government CCP is(hint, the name).

In my opinion US is only at fault for spying on it's own citizens(im not citizen nor resident of the us), and in doing so it undermined its counter intelegence actions against state adversaries. Next time there is a good guy in the white house, All intelligence apparatus should be dismantled and replaced with something more transparent for the people, even though the reality where most of the world is despotic by design and there for hostile to a supposed to be free nation is still there.

I'm not blaming either party. I don't even know who first started it. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in the argument. That's why I explicitly used generic names instead of CCP and US Gov.

So, usa was "proven" (well.. data was leaked and believed by many to be true) to be spying on many people, both local to US and foreign... and for china, all you have is "you're naive, if you don't think they doo it too".

So, you don't mind being spied on by someone who was already caught spying on their own citizens, (assuming that you're from USA), has access to you, your finances, can lock you up, can suicide you in jail, etc., but you're afraid of china who has access to none of those powers?

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