[GCU-Empiricist]

Considering that China has the great firewall due to it's government censorship I'm a bit shocked to see this as the top comment. The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.

[TaylorAlexander]

I don’t fully understand your argument. Because China has the great firewall they’re worse? I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way. I agree the firewall is a human rights issue in the way that US prisons are a human rights issue, but I’d be hesitant to say that because China is bad in this one way, the fact that they perform surveillance is made worse. The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware. We keep 0-day backdoors in computer hardware that was designed here, and there’s some uncertainty as to whether we arranged for those backdoors or only found them (NSLs make it difficult/impossible to know).

Further you dismiss the parent comment as implying the US and China’s surveillance are equivalent, but I don’t see that as the claim. There is a lot of shocked surprise in the news when we find that China is doing something we don’t like with our data or computers, but we ignore that the NSA builds massive data centers for data on the global population, we kill people based on that data, and we also engage in a global hacking war. And I think it’s important to make sure that when we talk about China, we’re also willing to talk about the US. If we never talk about what we do, someone else’s bad behavior will look warped.

The US and China are not equivalent, but it’s hard to talk about one fairly in this context without mentioning the other.

[ztratar]

> "I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way."

Really? One of the Great Firewall's primary use cases is to prevent data that could be used for surveillance to leave the nation.

China prohibits all sorts of data from leaving through the Great Firewall, such as telemetry.

> "The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware."

We are definitely the leader when it comes to foreign surveillance. When it comes to domestic, however, China is easily winning. They don't even hide it -- they require practically all interesting data to be available for their use by law.

[TaylorAlexander]

Doesn’t the US literally require huge amounts of data to be kept by corporations while also ensuring that through National Security Letters they can get what they need any time? Hillary Clinton actually campaigned on expanding “public private partnerships” for “data security”. She wanted to make it easier for corporations to share bulk data with the government without reprocussions.

[justinjlynn]

As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable depending on who's committing the act... and how much or how often they do it and for what reasons. If it unjust, it's unjust; it doesn't matter if its China or any of the Five Eyes members doing it, it's still just as wrong.

[arcticfox]

> As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable ... depending ... for what reasons. If it's unjust, it's unjust

I don't really agree with this. Intentions matter; the act of breaking into a house is way different if it's done to stop an in-progress assault vs. commit one.

It can obviously be argued in the actual scenario we're discussing how benevolent / evil / potentially unknowable the actors we're talking about actually are, but I don't think intention is irrelevant.

[justinjlynn]

Justification means it is not unjust. That's the point. That's going to vary depending on the culture in which the violation is occurring - as it should.

It's not really the intention that matters, but the circumstances motivating the action initially.

Example: murder in the course of self defence as "justifiable homicide" or the warranted tapping of someone's phone under supervision of the judiciary

The issue occurs here because those traditional national lines, which happen to also include cultural lines, are themselves being violated and we have no effective incidental means of addressing or justifying the act.

[godelski]

I definitely disagree with this. I'd change af's analogy though. There is a difference between someone breaking into your house and looking around and someone breaking into your house and confiscating things. Neither are good, they are just different degrees of bad.

[EGreg]

Maybe internally, China and Russia have worse freedom of speech.

But what does THAT have to do with using data vaccuumed up from overseas?

Microsoft Windows takes all your passwords and the CIA or FBI can legally give them a warrant to get the data. The NSA also probably has a nice backdoor.

Why would another country be OK with this? Especially for sensitive info.

Same for other operating systems.

Are you saying that since the US has better freedom of speech for its own citizens, therefore trusting it not to do anything harmful to people in another country makes way more sense?

[GCU-Empiricist]

To clarify, sorry too many people to reply to: I don't like surveillance. Stepping away from any tribal loyalty I might have to the five eyes I think you can qualitatively state that China is objectively a more totalitarian state hostile to the hacker ethos/freedom/pick your term for the terminal value most of us seem to agree on, which is what I was getting at with the great firewall. I am less worried about these less(least?) bad states collecting data then I am about the worse super-power doing so.

Edit: to->too d'oh