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.
People saying "but PRISM" have missed the past five years of US politics. Even Obama was getting mad at US tech.