The Snowden revelations caused tech companies to implement strong encryption for consumer facing communications. Apple, Google, and Facebook all offer encryption protocols that now piss off the US government and caused friction between the private and public sectors.
People saying "but PRISM" have missed the past five years of US politics. Even Obama was getting mad at US tech.
I always think of Ai Weiwei when considering just what's possible under the Chinese government and system. It's nice that my property won't be demolished and that I won't be kidnapped and beaten by police just because the government doesn't like my criticisms.
Do you have any proof despite statements that the entire internal surveillance programs of the NSA was dismantled or we should just believe because the US government would never lie to us?
Technically, while I do think that those companies have moved to stronger encryption over the past few years (which is a general trend I think) for consumer facing stuff, at least one of the changes that came out of PRISM was that Google started encrypting all of their communications in and out of their data centers (and in between) because PRISM was tapping at the datacenter level if I recall (something related to the note with the smiley face).
Encryption doesn't prevent state actors to require a secret backdoor. Your naive point of view ignore 40 years of history of spying and power abuse. It's worrying the past is erased so easily in the people's mind. It allows terrible behavior to come back rocking again and again.
One government is actually putting people into fucking camps[1], the other isn't.
The scale in which the Chinese Government is bad dwarfs the bad things the US Government may do. No Government is perfect, but there are orders of magnitudes in difference between the badness of the US and that of the Chinese Government.
So one is cancer, the other one is a broken leg. Yeah, I prefer to have the broken leg.
Doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow easily to break a leg.
Americans have been watching too much TV stating how great their country is, they now repeat it again and again without thinking about it. I've never seen any other free country population doing that anywhere in the world, and I travel a lot. It's even weirder when I come in the Valley and see that from the inside. Boy are you delusional.
I'm not American. I have no doubt that the American Government has its own daemons and is shit in many ways. However, it is at least notionally accountable to its populace, and has always claimed and aspired to be a beacon of freedom (I doubt its ever lived up t its claims). But the Chinese make no such claim, and do not act, nor try to act in such a virtuous manner.
As much as I detest America and their government, I'd rather a American hegemony than a Chinese one.
China putting some muslims, that may have been radicalizing, in camps to study Chinese history seems a lot better than the alternatives we employed in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
What kind of transparency would you like to see from them? For some things, like active secret investigations how would you expect them to act transparently and publicly?
That'll never happen. Even if the case is closed and there are no loose ends for that particular case, it would still reveal the collection methods used, potentially impacting other foreign intel and FISA related cases.
What? The CCP can be accused of many things, but a lack of transparency isn't one of them. They're easily one of the most transparent governments. They're just transparently authoritarian.
Did the Chinese government spend the last century toppling democratically elected governments and subjecting the populations to the horrors that followed purely for economic gain?
Lets not mention the torture program, which the current head of CIA took part.
Or the "humanitarian" invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria without UN Security Council mandate. Especially Lybya, which is much more democratic now with it's slave markets.
Or the protectionism that goes against the WTO treaties.
Or by weaponizing the dollar, which is supposed to be the world's reserve currency, by the means of sanctions.
Should I mentions the use of nuclear weapons and napalm against targets with dense civilian population close by?
China, Russia and the US are all draconian regimes. Some target it's own people, other target people overseas and others target both.
The difference is that one has holywood at it's side to show them saving the world time and time again from aliens, metheors and vile russians / nazis. And people just treat the US government as the good heart kid that makes a few mistakes.
Depends who is defining what is ethical of course. The fact that ethics is cultural will mean that each side will probably think they are the most ethical.
To disprove that claim: try to come up with an ethical framework which makes no mention of a higher power as justification, and tell us why it is better than all others. Most land on some variant of utilitarianism and then disagree what the objective function should be.
We can dance around the idea of ethics or we can actually look at historical actions taken by both. Putting the Chinese & US government interventionism on the same plain for objective ethics judgements is a joke (regardless of whos cultural ethical standards you use).
All of his/her comments in this post are seemingly only there to stir up people. There's no evidence behind the things they're saying other than a hand-waving attempt at minimizing China's bad faith actions by saying others do similar things. When arguing that someone who is 10/10 bad is equal to someone that is 4/10 bad you have to really reach to equate the two and not see the nuance.
There is no evidence? Too funny, I was hoping the work required was just reminding this (expected educated) audience of history, rather than teaching a full course myself.
There is a reason the statue of Lin Zexu is in Chatham Square, NYC.
Even if that was true, as an American, I would much prefer leaking to my government over that of a Communist dictatorship hellbent on becoming the ruling super power.
Hard to make a genuine privacy comparison with a straight face.