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Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more the other way round, that they don't want others to have the same powers they do?

If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like.

(see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure)

The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community.

We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.

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> and flash their baseband processor if you like

Could you please give some source on that info?

All the real documentation for this is likely to be classified, but here's

a backdoor: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin...

a patent for doing it in "civilian" applications: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en

sure, the NSA will respect that

Well damn. I had a vague feeling that something like that was possible, but this is eye opening, thank you.

In the US we allow significantly more spying on foreigners than US citizens. That’s not as controversial as domestic spying.

Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China.

And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2].

There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3].

So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do.