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Comment by nullwasamistake | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think "the devil you know" mentality is better when considering that any Telecom tech could be compromised. Yeah everybody is probably spying, so you should get your gear from your strongest allies.

Would you rather have a friend or an enemy spying on you? That appears to be the only options now that technology has thoroughly penetrated every day life.

Another point not mentioned enough is that societies with free press are far more likely to find and report exploits/backdoors. In a country like the US you see this a lot. There's many cases of security researchers reporting possible government funded exploits against their own government. In a place like China reporting something like that would probably mean you disappear

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> Would you rather have a friend or an enemy spying on you?

A better decision rationale would be; which of the two is more likely to use their spy-data against you?

And the answer to that is without doubt; your own local spy agency, not the one operating in another country.

In the long term, I'd not want my country's national security compromised by a morally bankrupt govt not subject to democracy.

Fundamentally much of what you think in this way is the direct product of propaganda from your own state. It would behoove you to investigate your own preconceptions and realise where you first got them.

It would behoove you to not guess at how I arrived at my beliefs and where I live and then claim I've got preconceptions.

I can see the facts of the Chinese government's authoritarianism, their persecution of their minority populations, and their international behavior just fine. In fact, they're so economically influential, that I find criticism of them is muted, and tolerance of their crap is high.

Tolerance of US crap is high from bombing civilians with drones using CIA black sites. Putting people on no fly lists for arbiratory reasons. Incarcerating minorities are some of the things that the US government does. So when US agencies say they don't like or trust Chinese tech I understand as they probably have backdoors in a lot of the western tech and when Chinese tech is used they lose the back doors. For most countries using Chinese tech vs Western tech is choosing the spying of 1 or the other.

My answer is the group that definitely has historical and real reasons to dislike you. China doesn't like the west. Never has never will.

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