[educationdata]

It's a bs comparison. The Chinese government surveillance is purely for dictatorship, and they do put political opponents and human rights lawyers in jail at a massive scale. The NSA surveillance is mostly for legitimate security reasons and is under restrict scrutiny.

[rolltiide]

LOL

China does it to protect their people from people that want to undermine and dismantle the party

This is true! This is exactly what we want to happen! These are security reasons from their perspective

Can you see how that is not so different? In the US we are as oblivious to the exact nature and motives of security threats too, and tolerate our border and surveillance agencies to preempt an unspecified threat. The mere existence of scrutiny doesnt make the systems that different.

[d1zzy]

I disagree that it's similar. It's one thing to perform surveillance on individuals where you have strong reasons to suspect they will engage in terrorist acts (meaning making plans to kill lots of people) and quite another to do so because someone disagrees with you being in power. I'm sure there's an overlap of people who do both but that's not the group I'm talking about and I'm also sure NSA/US authorities abuse their powers (hence why we constantly have to fight against power/survaillence creep) to monitor people that are simply political enemies but that doesn't negate the difference between the 2 situations (ie just because the US may engage in that type of behavior doesn't excuse the behavior China engages in). I grew up in an Eastern European communist dictatorship and I know what it means to be afraid to talk against the party and its leader. I'm now an immigrant to the US (so arguably no as many rights as a citizen) and in no way is there the same type of censorship and oppression.

Put it another way, where do you draw the line in terms of how the government is allowed to behave in regards to its citizens since you can pretty much excuse any abusive behavior under the reasoning of "security reasons"?

[rolltiide]

US intelligence agencies aren't in the business of picking people up and disappearing them for expressing discontent with the power structure.

I believe the Chinese government apparatus is in that business.

Regarding the surveillance for surveillance sake, I don't see much difference. I see you describe exactly what I did.