[Thriptic]

> The "good guys" (telco/law enforcement) have strict criterias to access it, like court order.

The good guys have a non-transparent approval mechanism for permission which no one can audit. In reality, you have no basis for claiming it's an effective overall control mechanism because none of us can see most of the data. Further, there have been numerous documented cases of abuse like intelligence officials spying on their significant others, parallel reconstruction on cases where secret data shouldn't have been used, etc.

An administrative policy control where application of the control is handled by the people holding the data with 0 auditing by anyone outside the system is not a strict control. Do I trust American intelligence more than the Chinese government or Huawei? Definitely, but that does not let American intelligence off the hook or justify what they are doing with mass data collection.

[Johnny555]

Do I trust American intelligence more than the Chinese government or Huawei?

Why would you trust American intelligence/law enforcement more than a foreign government (unless you have something to hide from that government, like if you are fostering unrest from abroad)?

There's not much reason for China to be interested in me, but there's lots of reasons I wouldn't want US law enforcement spying on me, since they are in a better position to make trouble for me.

[Enumerating123]

This take is essentially the "I have nothing to hide" argument except applied to China. Moreover, even if China is not interested in you in particular, it is interested in the executives, politicians, and decision makers that use our telecom infrastructure along with you. And you should care if those people are spied on by the Chinese government, probably more than about yourself being spied on by the US government.

While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.

[roenxi]

> While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.

Which specific part of the Middle East are you thinking of with that little gem? I'm looking at Iran on a map and they are the last stable center amongst a sea of catastrophes from Syria to Afghanistan that all have the sticky fingerprints of American influence on them. The entire Arabian peninsula is a mess hold together only by US support and stands as a real-time embarrassment of all the rhetoric out of Washington in my lifetime.

Compared to that, what exactly is China likely to do that could be worse?

The US has a bunch of stuff they can be proud of, but nobody is going to (indeed nobody is) take them seriously when their ambassadors hand-wringing about the risks of foreign spies or foreign influence. The US has been doing whatever they feel like for decades with little regard for anyone else and they have not shown themselves to be particularly honourable when there are real stakes, like oil, on the table.

[Mediterraneo10]

One place where China could do worse than US (or in the case of Syria, Russian) influence is internet access. In the Middle East there is some filtering and blocking on internet connections, but it remains trivial to circumvent and many computer-savvy teenagers already know how. China has already shown that it is interested in exporting its Great Firewall technology -- which is very challenging to circumvent -- to nations with which it establishes close ties.