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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

I laugh at the blatant double standards held by the U.S. government here. They want to do exactly the same thing in the U.S. with all companies, yet they criticize China for wanting to do the same thing there? You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want China to drop that policy, then you have to be willing to drop that policy too.

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The basic US premise is that we are the good side so the same rule for all does not apply to us. Only police can have weapons not everyone.

and we all knows what happens when you walk down that path... even if benevolence is your goal, that's a dictatorship, not a democracy. You will do what we say, not what we do. That's hypocritical and is the cause of things like terrorist attacks.

If you want to live in harmony with the world around you, you have to work to live in harmony with the world around you... with all the world's leaders one team, working together for the good of the world. You can't have one in there telling everyone else how they're going to act and then acting completely contrary to that themselves. That's not how things work.

Have these people not seen Star Wars? That's what happens when you try and control everyone. The U.S. is The Empire trying to enforce their will on the universe... and the terrorists, as clumsy and abhorrent as they are, are playing the role of the Jedi - except they're playing without honour or any form of human decency it seems.

That's what happens when you enforce your policies on other nations who have their own internal problems to worry about without you bitching about what they are or aren't doing for you.

If the U.S. wants to stop being at war with terrorists, how about find a way to give the terrorists an appropriate voice at the table. What is it they want? Why do they want it? What are they hoping to solve by getting it? How can the U.S. help them find a morally decent solution to their problems? Maybe then instead of constantly making enemies, they can make some friends. Friends are what you need when times are tough... and given U.S. unemployment, poverty and levels of incarceration just now, I'd say times are pretty tough. They could do with making some friends instead of just working to be part of the popular crowd [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes]. It's about time to drop being the school yard bully throwing their weight around and expecting everyone to bend to their will.

Yeah, and at least China is honest about their snooping. It's tiring hearing the company line here in the US about how we are so great with personal liberties.

...and they've become a going concern for anyone who has anything to do with U.S. corporations. Even if it's not been said, people are quietly pulling their data onto their own servers, outside of U.S. jurisdiction and encrypting the crap out of everything. It's a matter of national security. You cannot have another nation spying on your citizens. If you allow that to happen on your watch, you're signing the end of your political career.

China wants to go further than the U.S. From the article:

"requires companies to also keep servers and user data within China, supply law enforcement authorities with communications records and censor terrorism-related Internet content."

Last I checked, the U.S. does not require companies to keep servers and user data within the U.S. or censor terrorism-related content.

I think this is related to Chinese user data. Europe requires the same thing. European data must stay in Europe and European authorities must have access to that data. U.S. must not have access to, nor jurisdiction over that data. I think that's fair - it's basically a "You cannot spy on our citizens, but we can".

Of course, as people are becoming wise to these tactics, they're doing what they did with their money back in the day - sent it somewhere neutral that has strong privacy laws. Outside the jurisdiction of countries that will spy on them.

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