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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Are you seriously comparing the NSA to China?

I'm sure the NSA would love to ban VPNs, break Wikipedia's encryption and openly have censorship / spying programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project . But lets be frank, China is far ahead of anything going on in the Western world.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/13/china-crac...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/28/china_vpn_great_fire...

In the US, any hint of censorship or spying is met with extreme resistance. In China, censorship and spying isn't just accepted, its public policy. You can disappear for saying the wrong things on a public blog, and bloggers have developed codewords in response.

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It can both be that the NSA has capacities that the Chinese envy and that the Chinese have capacities the NSA envies.

And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public. China continues to make new public programs for censorship and domestic spying year after year, and there doesn't seem to be any stop to them.

China's Ministry of Public Security live listens to your connections and censors certain Wikipedia pages while you're browsing. I mean come on, the differences between China and NSA are incomparable.

The NSA barely can get away with looking at subpoenaed business records before Americans go apeshit crazy about it.

>there doesn't seem to be any stop to them.

The benefits of a one-party state. The real question is when is the next uprising and how many tanks will it take to crush it?

>And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public.

Public Support? First of all, Chinese government is known to hire internet commentators to show the public is on the government side.

Secondly, if you have read some comments from Sina Weibo (China's twitter), you would know the public don't support, but can't do anything about the censorship. China comes from a era when simply saying the wrong thing against the leader could get you killed. The latest news this month was five prominent Chinese figures has been detained for attending a private meeting discussing the 25th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Also a journalist in her 70s has been detained with her son "on suspicion of leaking state secrets to a foreign entity." Both incidents were reported in this news story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/07/world/asia/china-pu-zhiqia...

> Are you seriously comparing the NSA to China?

Where did I make such a comparison?

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