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Comment by goobatrooba | Hacker News Reader

As a European I have to admit I am these days more worried about the US than China. See yesterday's article about the US government forcing Microsoft to give them lists of Dutch government officials. Utter madness. At least the Chinese mainly care about the money and power levers, the US about strange worlds of revenge and manipulation, trying to change or influence your government. E.g. which of the two countries has put crippling personal sanctions on staff of the international criminal court?

Honestly I'd love to love the US again, but basically after Obama things have just gone down and down and no soul will trust the US again in the next generation or two.

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The situation you reference is related to a specific investigation by US congress requesting documents about potentially illegal censorship actions by EU officials from a specific company (microsoft). The difference is that the laws in china are broadly defined to include giving all intellectual property of anyone back to the government with no oversight, for the purposes of espionage.

The former relates to a specific investigation about potential criminal activity, the latter relates to broad illegal activity committed by the government itself unrelated to any specific case.

The US has no laws on the books forcing companies to wantonly give intellectual property and other espionage level material back to the government. If they did, no one would use cloud providers.

To avoid this, you can run your own hosted machine in a colocation facility, because in the US, people do have reduced rights when their data is controlled by a third party versus being controlled by themselves. Its the same as if the data was in your house, they would need a search warrant to obtain it, but when its at a Azure or AWS datacenter not controlled by you, your privacy rights are reduced by doing this.

> no one would use cloud providers

I think many are trying to move away from US providers actually. FISA section 702 and the current administrations liberties taken towards international law are not helping. The trust problem is real.

Not sure I’d trust China with anything onshore. But offshore, it does seem they play by the rules, because it pragmatically serves the stability of the people. China has not started wars in the past 50 years or so. By that logic one may assume they’d not abuse the arguably broad powers over Chinese firms abroad to risk one now.

In a world where rules are increasingly less important how states use power matters more to me than how they claim to be monitored.

> If they did, no one would use cloud providers.

EU has literal directive about location of data which has to be located in the EU and not in the USA, because the data are in danger otherwise.

Yep, and then they let US companies handle that data. One more proof EU regime is run by ... no, I won't tell, don't wanna get arrested.

> The US has no laws on the books

Correct. They come up on Twitter daily. Pardon, this other truth bullshit.

Exactly this.

I don't care about the US more than about Russia or China these days.

They are definitely not our allies anymore.

you dont need to be allies to do business. walmart is not my ally.

True, but then I expect them to betray me at any junction and I'll gladly do the same.

Not enough trust to do business.

The difference is that Walmart is a stable, reliable trade partner that honors contracts and is not trying to use propaganda to make you a fascist

Besides the language barrier it’s actually also just simpler to do business with the Chinese. There are issues like censorship but they are known & can be routed around. It’s best to just ignore the US and move your business elsewhere.

As an Australian, I completely agree with every point in your response

so govt forcing a private coroporation being a big deal that a its on the worldwide news is more scary to you than an implicit mandate that china forces on its companies?

That particular rot actually turned cancerous with Bush and Cheney, not Obama, IMO.

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