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Comment by coronadisaster | Hacker News Reader

governments monitor all major companies... including the US government (PRISM is pretty old now, so we can assume that they monitor others by now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) ). So if the traffic is not end-to-end encrypted, assume that they can view your traffic. Sometime they play on words and say that end-to-end means from customer to cloud... but the cloud should not have the key.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481161.

Not all governments are equal. Cut out this whaddaboutism.

Edit: When I replied, OP was simply “governments monitor all major companies... including the US government”

Please don't post this sort of unsubstantive and generic comment. It makes discussion more predictable and much less interesting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Also, the whataboutism trope is an example of canned arguments that don't belong in HN threads. One should respond either to the specifics of an argument, or downvote/flag a comment as appropriate, or just not respond. I wrote more on this elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481335.

The original comment was essentially, “the US does this too.”

That is the comment attempting to constrain the conversation by generalizing it beyond meaning.

S/he is not saying all governments are equal in all respects. As far as we know only the Chinese, Russians and the 5-Eyes have the technical capacity to monitor us all and have been caught out doing it.

So yes, you are correct: not all governments are equal, but the US and Chinese are similar in their practical totalitarian capacities.

In the US system you are free to criticize the government. In the Chinese and Russian systems you are not. That alone tells me all I need to know about who I want scooping up my data.

Have you tried to criticize government in Russia ? Have you tried to criticize it in the US ? If not , then how could you compare these cases ?

but being in the US, I don't really care if a foreign government looks at my social media (what are they going to do?)

Freedom from surveillance facilitates criticism of the government. Do away with that and you end up with something like Russia or China.

No, saying "governments monitor all major companies" can be an easy dismissal of any privacy concern.

Governments are just human organizations. They have different levels of rapaciousness, resources, skills, corruption...

Even if they were all the same, it does not makes it acceptable.

Equally, software and services can have excellent security or be terrible.

Whataboutism is usually done to defend something by making it look better in comparison but what the OP was arguing is that we should be pursuing end to end encrypted solutions exclusively because it’s not just the Chinese government who are doing the snooping. ie he’s not defending Zoom nor the Chinese government but suggesting the complaint against Zoom/China doesn’t go far enough

Exactly. Assume that governments and large companies can and will spy on you and act accordingly. Do not get suckered into some simplistic nationalistic narrative in which "our" side is good.

There's two problems with that line of thought. First, "our side" is not good but it is better. Notwithstanding the current unpleasantness, the US government isn't locking up and "reeducating" hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Second, good or bad, it is our side and the CCP is the other side: only an ethically and intellectually challenged person offers tacit support for the "other side" because their own side fails some specious purity test.

I don’t personally see it as a competition about which side is worse. I see the lack of end to end encryption as more like a security hole that needs fixing irrespective of whether you trust one side more than the other.

> the US government isn't locking up and "reeducating" hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.

Uhh, yes it is? Primarily urban black males.

> only an ethically and intellectually challenged person offers tacit support for [one side] because [the other] side fails some specious purity test.

This is very true though. Both sides are very evil, and laumars[0] has the right of it: we need to not trust either of them.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482044

the US government isn't locking up and "reeducating" hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.

Discuss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

> As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense repeated claims that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps"

https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/06/we-know-lot-less-we-thi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

OP was in fact not making that argument when I posted my comment.

Obviously I agree that E2E should be the default and that ideally you have no governments snooping. The initial comment was a far less substantive, “US spies too.”

If the company itself is compromised, e-2-e doesn't matter.

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