Underlying your point there is an assumption that Chinese government = American government in it's misuse of data etc.
I don't think this is true. And I've run a privacy advocate organisation and I'm a complete Snowden fanboy. But if I had to choose between giving my data to the CCP or the American government, the choice is easy.
Even though a lot of data collection was done without warrants in the USA, there's been a lot of blowback, and there is still changing presidents/executive, changing representatives, and rule of law (not perfect, but still there).
On the other side you have a CCP rolling out social scoring, running concentration camps, etc etc.
It's just not the same. Let's not pretend it is somehow equivalent.
You've completely proved my point, which is that in every argument people make bad comparison between the US and China. In every single item here, you greatly stretch either what the US has done to clearly over-exaggerate it, stretch what the CCP has done to under-exaggerate it, or sometimes out-right make a completely false comparison - it's really clear you're not doing it in good faith. Examples:
(1) > If you don think that the NSA is spying on half the western world
If you'd read the Snowden papers, you'd see that the NSA collects metadata on US persons, and can only collect specific (non-meta-)data on those that they submit a warrant for. Completely invalid comparison, not remotely comparable to the CCP requiring all companies to hand over all data of all persons in China non-encrypted.
Bonus points for the "If you don't think" emotional manipulation.
(1b) > the CIA on the other half
Baseless speculation that conveniently fits the position you hold and nothing else.
(2) > When every country develops, they "borrow" from the previously developed countries.
Classic whataboutism. What America did centuries ago has no bearing on what China does now - it's actually far worse now, because we generally have better-developed senses of morals and that stealing is bad. Also, while US citizens might have taken technology from other countries, the CCP government is doing the theft here - and it's outright breaking and entering to do so, too.
(3) > Target and extradite people for "corruption" (real or not), US targets and attempts to extradite people for leaking evidence of war crimes and spying.
Nope, false comparison. In Operation Fox Hunt, the CCP (a) targeted people for merely speaking out about government (b) targeting their families and (c) didn't charge many of the targets with any crime whatsoever. None of those things apply to the US. Thinking that this is even remotely similar to charging someone for espionage and attempting to extradite them using the legal system is actually completely insane; there's no similarities whatsoever to the CCP trying to covertly and illegally coerce citizens to return home for crimes for which they have never been charged by threatening their families.
You just literally didn't make any point at all here. So, to recap for viewers at home: there's no US equivalent to the CCP massacring students with tanks at Tienanmen Square.
(5) > Surprise surprise but the US has its own 50 cent army.
Fine, as a US citizen, I condemn any forms of propaganda taken by my government on my behalf. You're defending yours. Also, uh, any evidence that the US has also hired two million propaganda creators to create several hundred million posts? Barely comparable, but this is the only solid point you've made so far.
(6a) > Yes let us go liberate the enslaved children
You engage in sarcasm because it's clear that you don't have a point. Let me be clear what this point is: the CCP is tyrannical in a way that other governments are not.
(6b) > and sometimes mandatory
Mandatory abortion is more tyranny, not less.
(7) > The unlucky and unarmed populations of Iraq and Afghanistan who are continued to be massacred via drone strike.
Completely insane comparison. You do know that the point of Tienanmen Square was that the people getting massacred were (a) intentionally killed (b) unarmed (c) students (d) peacefully protesting (e) Chinese citizens and (f) the government has enforced a media blackout on it? That's literally the opposite of Iraq/Afghanistan in every single way. Meanwhile, the closest comparison you can make is (a) accidentally killed collateral damage (which is terrible, but not that it's not intentional) from the US hunting people who flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, and the targeted people are (b) armed (c) terrorists (d) trying to kill us who are (e) not US Citizens and (f) the US government doesn't enforce a media blackout when they mess up, and calling a few dozen deaths (which are tragic, but all accidental - the result of the military being careless, not the PLA tank operators intentionally running over students) "massacre" is also crazy.
(8) > Assange and Snowden
Insane comparison. Snowden and Assange both leaked classified information that cost the US billions (tens of billions? hundreds?) of dollars of taxpayer money to develop and resulted in lives lost, and whose significance was military and intelligence capabilities (yeah, Snowden wasn't about telling the people about a spying program - if it was, he would have only leaked docs about the NSA spying on American citizens in particular, but you know what? 99% of the material leaked had nothing to do with spying on American citizens at all, and was just straight-up sending classified military+defense information to other countries). Not even remotely comparable to the CCP suppressing information on the military massacring peacefully protesting civilians with no defense or strategic value.
(9a) > What is Guantanamo Bay?
A place that (a) many Americans actively protest (unlike Xinjiang, which it seems like is constantly defended by Chinese nationals) (b) holding a few thousand people (instead of a few million) that (c) are suspected of committing terrorism (not "innocents").
(9b) How many millions of blacks are locked up in American prison for no reason other than their skin color and a sham charge of jaywalking or dug possession.
Also a completely insane comparison. Bringing up skin color is crazy - US judges do not, as a rule, discriminate based on skin color. Prisons in the US aren't even remotely comparable to the labor camps in Xinjiang, and even though the American justice system has problems (that are being protested by its citizens, as opposed to being defended, like Chinese nationals defend Xinjiang), every person taken in has a public trial with a charge that's on the books - as opposed to the CCP disappearing citizens with no trial, and no charge other than just being Uyghur, and denying that the places they're being held exist in the first place.
(10a) > The US literarily strong arming its states for trying to boycott Israel.
This is one of the only even partially-valid points you have made here. "Partially" because while it's very bad for the federal government to pass laws on the states about this matter, it's also categorically different for the federal government to restrict what state governments can do for geopolitical reasons, than it is for the CCP to financially blackmail foreign companies for expressing a very sane and reasonable position: that Taiwan is a separate country from China.
(10b) > The US enacting regime change when the wrong person was democratically elected...
This isn't even relevant to anything here. You're just throwing it out to try to add chaff to your arguments.
(11) > ???????
This is the only fully-valid point/comparison you've made in this entire post. I misspoke - I meant to say "CCP planning to invade Taiwan..." and it was because I perceived that the old leadership of China (before the cultural revolution) had fled there - but I can't find any evidence of that, so I'm withdrawing this claim.
> To find this level of ignorance here is semi-astounding.
Pure emotional manipulation.
> Propaganda works, and that post is proof of it.
What are some of the characteristics of propaganda? Assertions of vague or unknown truths (1b, 5, 10b), exaggerate the facts (1, 2, 3, 7, 9b), misdirection of attention (6, 10b), emotional manipulation (6a, 9a, 9b, last sentence), wild comparisons that aren't valid (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10a). I made the points that I had in good faith, using sound logic, and withdrew the one that I realized was wrong (11).
The distinction you're trying to draw between the US, where privacy is supposedly protected by legal processes, and China, where the government spies on its citizens, is not tenable after all the revelations about extensive government spying in the US.
Snowden showed that the US government was secretly compelling all the major tech companies to hand over vast amounts of user data to the NSA. This is formally illegal, but it has now been going on for decades, and there's almost no way to challenge it.
The US and PRC are not exactly the same in terms of where freedom and security matter.
Maybe i'm not understanding what you wrote, but are there any recent examples of US 'monitoring' our own citizens, and then turning them into (whatever our form of) secret services? besides criminal behavior?
from my reading you imply that someone 'doing the right thing' like speaking out against for instance the overreach of our government - like i'm decrying right now - could land a US citizen in some Xinjiang-like interment camp for 're-education.'
prima face ridiculous comparison. so it goes with every CCP thread that spirals with attempts to distract and deflect. And hey maybe it works since I always seem to get sucked in.
and how is the overreach snowden revealed comparable to the active (as opposed to passive dragnet surveillance), constant, oppressive digital intervention of CCP in the lives of its citizens, let alone the gross misuse of tracking technology to perpetrate an ongoing genocide?
"China" (as in the CCP) does not, in fact, have the data. They're leveraging a network of mostly-private companies to do the dirty work for them. So there's really no difference. If the US government became a dictatorship tomorrow, all the data collected by US private companies would end up in the government's hands. Neither private companies nor government entities can be trusted, and the only right answer is to demand that the data is not collected in the first place.
Some people take the position that it's better for the US government to have access to Chinese people's data than for the Chinese government to have access their data because the US government is better (e.g. more due process).
3. All of the above can be improved, but shifting the argument to "what's bad about the US system" away from "what China is actually doing" is drifting into deflection.
What about this false equivalency between China and the US? Even in a worse case scenario, data being taken by US intelligence is given SOME form of oversight. If you believe the US and China are similarly free, I invite you to tell me if you feel like you’re as free in New York City and San Francisco as Shanghai or Shenzen.
If you don’t think living in those two locations is equivalent, then why do you argue the data collection is the same.
The scale and nature of what is captured is COMPLETELY different, and American laws about data protection are completely different.
America has clear rules in place before stored data can be accessed by the state, with few exceptions.
China has a blanket policy of supplying all data to the state at its request, and there is no independent judiciary or other means of appealing this process.
Instead of Whataboutism, consider looking into why every major nation in the world (bar a few heavily reliant allies) are turning on China as the extent and nature of their policies and intentions has become impossible to ignore. Xi is a large part of this strategic turn in what was already an Orwellian dictatorship - read about his geostrategic goals.
As a US citizen and resident I would far more prefer to have to contend with the US Govt than the CCP on this matter. At least in the US there is some legal procedure, accountability and civil society culture around limiting govt power. With the CCP there is none of that, neither for Chinese citizens nor foreigners.
It’s clear that the CCP is assembling a database of information on everyone in the developed world, not just in China, and that they intend to use it as part of their soft power arsenal (along everything else from economic incentives to Confucious Institutes).
The CCP is much more frightening and less accountable than the US Govt, especially as they reach parity in soft and hard power.
In the US the government can secretly spy on your data by jumping through various legal hoops. In China the government gets such data as a matter of routine.
Both the American and Chinese governments have bad track records when it comes to abusing civil liberties, privacy intrusion. I would say that the Chinese government is worse, but that doesn't really matter from my perspective for this particular thing.
As an American, I expect that the US government, if it wants it enough, can obtain access to my communications (at least while using US infrastructure), assuming they're not e2e encrypted. Hopefully such access would be gated by a warrant, and I expect in most cases that's how it works, though I do expect there are abuses here and there.
The Chinese government, however, should not have any kind of access to any of my communications (unless I am visiting China, using their infrastructure; or perhaps am communicating with someone in China from abroad). In addition, if the relationship between the US and China ever sours to the point of war, presumably the Chinese would have no problem using any possible backdoors to disrupt US telecom networks.
Given this, I would much rather the US use US-built telecom infrastructure than Chinese-built infra. I think an argument over which government is more moral or trustworthy is just not useful here.
Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS.
Most of the information required to compare is not public, maybe China got a better equipment and funding than USA... but even if that's the case, it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated.
It seems naive to believe that the US isn't comparable to China when it comes to surveillance considering the actions taken and information that has come out, particulary since 9/11
edit: Why the downvotes with no response despite my comment being entirely relevant? If anyone would like to explain/counter I would be curious to hear their reasoning
What are you afraid of a Chinese company doing with your data? Giving it to government agencies? Google already does that. If I had to choose personally I would much rather the CCP have my data than US three letter agencies. If you live in the US then the US government can do a lot more to you than China can.
Ironically I think you can make a pretty strong case that both the Chinese and American governments are more of a threat to their own citizens data wise given that citizens tend to primarily be pestered within their own jurisdiction.
The US government does things that aren't too good. But as far as having my data in Chinese or US intelligence's hands, I'll go with the country that won't put me in jail if one of my WeChats they monitor says something like "I don't like this country."
I don't think this is true. And I've run a privacy advocate organisation and I'm a complete Snowden fanboy. But if I had to choose between giving my data to the CCP or the American government, the choice is easy.
Even though a lot of data collection was done without warrants in the USA, there's been a lot of blowback, and there is still changing presidents/executive, changing representatives, and rule of law (not perfect, but still there).
On the other side you have a CCP rolling out social scoring, running concentration camps, etc etc.
It's just not the same. Let's not pretend it is somehow equivalent.
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