Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

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This is a "both sides"/whataboutism argument. China is absolutely worse than the US in this regard. Chinese military intelligence actually conducts offensive espionage on behalf of Chinese companies to steal IP from western companies.

The US has a court system that reviews National Security Letters, and can accept challenges to them, and while that court is secret, it's still bound by rules that are established by elected congressional officials. ...and perhaps most importantly, they are still somewhat rare.

Chinese companies on the other hand are required to cooperate on all requests, even international subsidiaries of any Chinese companies. No "letters" or court orders - you either do it or the CEO goes to jail, no trial, no judicial review.

It might seem like the results are similar, but having judicial and congressional oversight makes a world of difference in tempering how/when it can be used and, more importantly, rolling it back when it's no longer necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#Doe_v...

It's a night and day comparison.

Sorry I think you've drank the koolaid. There's no judicial oversight when it comes to national security. They'll always be able to find judges that are sympathetic to the FBI/CIA's cause

Re "no judicial review": that is one of the big concerns about national security letters though, the lack of judicial review; I read the Wikipedia page you linked and it says, even after the Doe v. Ashcroft case, "there is still no requirement to seek judicial approval for the FBI issuing an NSL". Per the EFF [1], the change was to give "technology companies a right to request judicial review of the gag orders accompanying NSLs", but companies must issue a reciprocal notice to trigger this procedure. The EFF advocates that the government should "bear the complete burden of going to court and proving the gag is truly necessary"; but currently that is not the case.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/requiring-judicial-rev...

I agree that it is a night and day comparison, the fact that the legality of this process is even argued in the courts is evidence of that, but national security letters are today still deeply problematic.

If your metric is being "not as bad as China" regarding civil rights, you will loose many, many freedoms in the short to medium term. Because you can justify a lot of overreach, so exactly what was happening the last decade.

> and can accept challenges to them

Is there a public count of how many challenges vs how many were rejected?

I don't agree with the impingements on rights done by China, the U.S. or any other country on this globe. Authoritarianism should be challenged where ever it appears and in whatever form it takes.

replying “Whataboutism” is just a reductive way to defend “hypocrisy” in a geopolitical context. which is worse? Not being aware of the similarity and replying “whataboutism”, or being aware of the similarity just gaslighting and deflecting with whoever pointed out the hypocrisy?

most of these observations are very valid

just because you coincidentally respect the due process that reaches a result, doesn’t mean that it is a functionally different or better. its only indoctrination and pure happenstance to whatever you were exposed to first.

Yup. Whataboutism is only fallacious if you use it to claim moral superiority. Whataboutism is not fallacious if you're trying to draw an equivalent between two actors.

How is whataboutism even fallacious. You can be logically consistent and still do whataboutism. It's more like a distraction to an argument being made. There nothing that inherently makes it fallacious.

I can understand that argument, but some people do essentially use whataboutism as a tu quoque to completely dismiss an argument and treat it as obsolete. Obviously this is very rarely the case.

It's hypocrisy when X criticizes Y for doing something that X also does. It's not hypocrisy for a third party to criticize party X for doing something they're not doing, even if they fail to bring up a criticism of Y in the same breath.

The power of whataboutism is the change of topic so it isn't adressed. Like talking about China when the topic is government accessing your data.

So stripping whataboutism, your argument is basically reducted to "the FBI accesses a source of info but that isn't bad because of oversight".

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