[somenameforme]

How quick are we to forget PRISM [1] and the countless other related programs that have been revealed. Any tech company operating in any country is going to be subject to the state interests within that country. Anything beyond that matter of fact is going to be a matter of public relations come propaganda.

You can see this leaking into the public in the US most commonly with China. China is still a geopolitical adversary of the US, but they're also the economic future of the world. So big companies want to appeal to China, but are in a constant balancing act between that and keeping domestic powers happy.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[throw10920]

Nobody's "forgetting" anything - it's simply that the US doesn't have any programs that are remotely comparable to those of Russia or China. For instance, show me the US federal law that requires that companies to provide them with constant unencrypted access to all users' data (and forbid E2E), without a warrant, and to provide real-time monitoring and censorship of all communication data.

Comparing metadata collection to legally mandated decryption, storage, monitoring, and censorship of all user data and metadata is insane.

[somenameforme]

You're confusing section 215 of the "Patriot Act" - later on the "USA FREEDOM Act" (don't you love the names) with PRISM. The two are quite different spying acts. The USA FREEDOM spying is where the whole metadata only debacle came from.

From the Wiki which references the NSA's own slides, PRISM offers: "extensive, in-depth surveillance on LIVE [emphasis mine] communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.

One of the leaked documents is a training manual for spying on Skype calls, which are routed right on over to the NSA. It even had a technical support FAQ which includes issues like understanding why messages are being repeated - they're being synched to another device which resends everything, or how to most effectively spy on a user using multiple IDs. It was quite user friendly!

The entire scope of the NSA is really quite absurd. They even had/have spies installed in World of Warcraft [1]. It's all quite dystopic but it often feels like we're stuck closer to Brazil than 1984.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/ns...

[iostream24]

I think it’s rather a concern that too much bending over backwards to please Xi will jeopardize their customers trust. There is a concerted effort now afoot both in the EU and the USA to bring certain tech fabrication processes to domestic shores for various reasons. The race to the bottom of costing in pursuit of profit margins brought other issues to the forefront and once the market probed the lower end of costing possibilities consumers noticed things like scissors that bend when cutting paper, and there’s been a large backlash, arguably one of the principle fuels feeding the fires of this fake so-called-populism.

Im not so sure about China being the economic future of the world these days, despite decades hearing this and despite actual economic sizes and pollution footprints, as I’m not sure China and the US or EU markets can decouple effectively so easily. It’s a bit of a double edged sword for all concerned

[mschuster91]

> Im not so sure about China being the economic future of the world these days, despite decades hearing this and despite actual economic sizes and pollution footprints, as I’m not sure China and the US or EU markets can decouple effectively so easily. It’s a bit of a double edged sword for all concerned

The US/EU for a long time acted like "change through trade" (or in German, "Wandel durch Handel") would be a realistic prospect for dealing with both China and Russia. Obviously that failed, with Russia invading Ukraine and China following the 1933-45 footsteps with the Uyghurs. The behavior of both Russia and China has become so explicitly bad that even the hope for profits cannot make politicians look away longer.

The problem is: China has amassed enormous amounts of money, and they are using that money in a way similar to the Marshall Fund of the past-1945 era to build out immense support and a destination market for their goods in Africa and Asia. For better or worse, China will become a dominant player in geopolitics.

[skhr0680]

Regardless of how much money they throw around, the list of China’s friends in Asia is much shorter than the list of countries that would literally rather burn to the ground than bend the knee to a Chinese emperor again, and I think that’s a big problem for their aspirations of being a major player in geopolitics.