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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

The double standard is in calling China an enemy when China has never done jack shit to Canada for allegedly spying through tik tok, but scolding off the southern neighbor which we have multiple proofs has put all Canadians under mass surveillance (from communication to movement) for which we have proofs and leaks by whistleblowers like Snowden or the AT&T guy.

That's what worries me, the easiness with which we label one as enemy, and assume the other one being normal.

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China proveably opened illegal police stations in Canada. China arrested two Canadians and threw them in prison in pure retaliation when Canada detained a Chinese CEO in her mansion in Vancouver.

The issue here is that TikTok was allowing its offices to act on behalf of the CCP in opposition to Canadian interests. If we discover Google is running anti Canadian CIA ops we would have an issue with that as well.

The difference is presumably that Canada is happy to have google collect data since google is happy to cooperate with CSIS.

You're deaf aren't you.

What you're pointing out is peanuts (in practice, and overblown in news) compared to your southern neighbour spying and meddling, so why are things that would be very minor such a huge issue?

Peanuts become a real problem when the country throwing them is a totalitarian dictatorship, and spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy.

How many people are forgetting those basics will never cease to surprise me.

First of all, when intelligence services are concerned, it doesn't seem like it matters much whether it's a democracy or not, since everything is done in secret. So voters (even in a two-party system) couldn't really make informed voting decisions on anything related, unless of course whistleblowers inform us about the secretive stuff. But even then, not much seems to differ between a republican and a democract president / government.

So, effectively, it seems like US voters have the same amount of influence on their intelligence services' spying, both domestic and international, than citizens of China do.

Long story short, "spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy" is definitely not something I agree with, at least not in the democractic setups we see in the west (and that includes Europe, to be clear).

I'm not deaf, but please don't use a disability as a slur for ignorance.

I'm not defending what the US has done, but compromising elected officials in the House of Parliament is not 'peanuts' by any measure, and it is something that China has done, and the US hasn't.

I also have never said that what the US is doing is acceptable.

If Google opened offices that were a CIA front posing a national security risk, I would expect them to be shown the door as well. From what I understand, the reason Bytedance had their offices shut down was because they were acting as a front for the CCP.

There is just a lot of really dumb people we live with.

Imagine believing there would be something as powerful as Tiktok and it wouldn't be used for propaganda purposes.

It is just boring agreeing with these morons at this point. Let them live in their dream world as they pretend to be smart. Sheep are easy to herd.

You're projecting.

The only naivety I see is assuming this is any different in our media (legacy or web based), especially when we have multiple evidence of the contrary on our own platforms.

Canada and China are absolutely not on good terms diplomatically. There is a lot of recent history of disagreeable behavior by the Chinese involving Canada and Canadians.

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