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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

> American brands are much, much more aggressive about making you connect to the internet, install our apps, create an account

This whataboutism ignores one very important point.

When you connect a device to an American company they might do things that we consider privacy violations, while still staying generally within the bounds of the law. We like to joke about data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.

Contrast this to Chinese companies where by law every company is part-owned by the government itself. The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers, but their job is to find and exploit intelligence on foreign individuals and businesses.

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I agree with most of your point but.

>data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.

They didn't build the Utah Data Center because of their extremely limited amount of data.

We all like to joke about our data going to the NSA because our data has been repeatedly been caught going to the NSA.

Yeah, it’s not a joke…

> They didn't build the Utah Data Center because of their extremely limited amount of data.

I love that people point to one of the smallest NSA data centers as if its going to prove some sort of point.

Regardless, this is exactly the kind of whataboutism that I am talking about. Every government collects all the data it can. The difference is that the NSA targets foreign governments and terror organizations. The Chinese government targets the same but also goes after their citizens, foreign citizens, foreign corporations, etc.

>The difference is that the NSA targets foreign governments and terror organizations

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_global_surveillance_discl...

Sorry, but you seem a little naive. I recommend reading up on the US domestic surveillance program that the government was caught red handed engaging in.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

We have almost a million people holding a TS or higher clearance, and have on average one incident a year of someone attempting to spy on a spouse or love interest, to which they get rolled up in their regular poly. So basically not a problem at all.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...

I never denied that the IC spies on foreign governments and terror organizations. In fact, we are really fucking good at it. You can't query or access domestic communications or those of USPER without review by the FISA courts and high level approval.

>The difference is that the NSA targets foreign governments and terror organizations. The Chinese government targets the same but also goes after their citizens, foreign citizens, foreign corporations, etc.

Thanks for the laugh, this was one of the funnier things I've read in awhile.

The idea of running any internet-connected software with a push-update mechanism, built and controlled by a company in a country without a strong independent rule of law, should terrify far more people than it apparently does.

This is one of those 'It's not a problem until it is a problem, and then it's a big fucking problem' scenarios.

>a country without a strong independent rule of law

I'd really like you to try and define this term in a way that doesn't exclude the US

If anyone wants to point to US FISA laws and use that to equate the US justice system with China's, I'm all ears...

I'm not sure what you are getting at, but judicial independence is one thing that the USA has (in some quantity) that China has none of. There is no such thing as judicial review in China, if the official class decides to ignore China's constitutional freedoms of speech, religion, and press, then there is no recourse for a court to come in and say, "no, that's not right." Vs. the USA, where the Supreme court comes in all the time and tells presidents and congress what they can't do.

The Chinese government has said multiple times that it believes rule of law is a western imperialistic concept, so it isn't like this is even a goal for them.

It's pretty obvious that this is not a problem at all, the only problem right now it's fabricating a narrative where someone is bad "because" while everyone allied with us (the west) it's not "because not".

You seem to be worried that an unfair judicial system poses a threat to everyone connected to the internet, well I got some news for you: Uber received $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and they are planning now to invest $40 billion on AI. Why are US companies accepting money from a bloodthirsty dictatorship then? A dictatorship where the actual dictator, Bin Salman, among other things, detained three members of the royal family (his family) for unexplained reasons, ordered the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that, even more worrisome, had spies in Twitter and McKinsey that helped him track down dissidents and silence critics. McKinsey and Twitter are still actively working with the Saudis and nobody has nothing to say about it... Not surprisingly the Saudi Prince Alwaleed is the second largest investor in twitter ATM through the Kingdom Holding.

Maybe we should refocus our priorities on the issues at large, not just those issues that are beneficial to the US in their war for the global supremacy.

A pile of facts is not an argument.

I understand this is how modern pro-wrestling news addresses issues, but assembling a mass of emotionally-inflammatory things doesn't buttress your point.

Specific countries have greater or lesser individual rights and adherence to law.

Why doesn't it make sense to take that into account when extending trust to specific pieces of software running on your device?

> This whataboutism ignores one very important point.

Reverse whataboutism is still whataboutism.

For example this predicate

> while still staying generally within the bounds of the law.

Completely ignores the fact that US companies have been found lying and deceiving to circumvent the barriers posed by the law.

But not only US companies, remember the diesel gate?

This other predicate

> (In China) by law every company is part-owned by the government itself

It's completely false, while this one

> The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers

It's pure intellectual dishonesty . Every sufficiently advanced intelligence agency has spies. With the USA agencies being the largest employers for spies on the entire Planet.

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