Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

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They do matter, completely. Has the data from national security programs ever been used for non-national security purposes (ie in public policing for instance)? It is rare if not unheard of in most western countries. Conversely, it is used all the time for censorship and policing in China.

These checks and balances declared the metadata programs unconstitutional.

https://www.cnet.com/news/appeals-court-finds-nsas-bulk-phon...

Is the system perfect? Not even close, but it does strive to minimize abuse. Plenty of countries here in the EU have national security programs that operate in a similar fashion. The goal shouldn’t be no data collection, it should strive to minimize abuse and keep collection limited to that national security concerns. None of that is true of the programs in China.

"Conversely, it is used all the time for censorship and policing in China."

Sure- in China. I'm not in China. Censorship might be a problem, but outside of that, I'd much rather have the Chinese government (and even Chinese local police!) have my metadata, and even data, than give the US national security apparatus the same access.

Corporate IP is another exception to this- it's pretty clearly better that the US, rather than China, have access to my work data.

But for, say, a Snowden-esque whistleblower in the US- can you really say they'd be better off with, say, DHS having access to all their data instead of the Chinese government? Obviously ideally nobody would, but for them, a system whose failure mode is "China can associate your IP and email address" is, I believe, dramatically better than "DHS/NSA can associate your IP and email address".

> But for, say, a Snowden-esque whistleblower in the US

Sure if you are acting on the state level against US or European governments China would be better but for everyone else I think it’s extremely safe to say US/EU.

I’ll add though that I am fairly confident the security of your data in the hands of the Chinese Government is far less secure than when in US/EU. Just last year hundreds of millions (yes hundreds) of social media logs and private chats were released on the web from a hack on a Chinese surveillance system.

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