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Comment by redserk

14 days ago

To start: I do not trust the CCP, but my trust in the American legal system has been waning.

What's the legal recourse for a US Citizen served with a dodgy FISA-related subpoena/warrant?

Or if a government agency wants to purchase tracking data that includes my phone from a data collection agency? Say the state of Texas purchases geotracking data for app users who cross state lines.

32 comments

redserk

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rainsford  14 days ago

Apple famously told the FBI to go pound sand when asked to help access an iPhone in an actual terrorism case (i.e. it wasn't about going after dissidents or journalists or anything), even though such help was definitely within Apple's technical power.

Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?

  • janalsncm  13 days ago

    There is a good book on the American surveillance apparatus Means of Control by Byron Tau. People are a lot more watched than they think.

    The Apple example is well-known because it is an exception. Much more common is not only compliance but making an entire business out of selling private data to the government.

    https://theintercept.com/2022/04/22/anomaly-six-phone-tracki...

    It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.

    • redserk  13 days ago

      > It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.

      This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.

      2 replies →

  • lmm  13 days ago

    > Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?

    Yes. We've seen the back and forth with e.g. Jack Ma. It doesn't happen as publicly because it's not such good marketing in China, but of course it happens.

  • taneq  13 days ago

    They sure did! They also (was it around that time? I forget...) pushed pretty hard for everything to be stored in iCloud, where coincidentally it's not protected by any of the on-device security and can (as I understand it) be legally requisitioned by the authorities. Happy to be corrected (with sources) if I'm wrong here but otherwise this seems very much on par.

toss1  14 days ago

Whatever slim you want to think your recourse is in the US, it is FAR better and broader than in the country that has uncounted mobile execution vans with zero available records of who is executed.

At least the US is trying to be a democracy, and has largely functioning checks and balances.

CCP is flat-out 'you cannot even talk or access information on things that make us look bad, such as Tibet or Tiananmen Protests' and 'make the wrong criticism at the wrong time and it is over for you'.

There is a MASSIVE difference. Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.

  • deciplex  13 days ago

    > Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.

    Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.

    America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.

    China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.

    • Workaccount2  13 days ago

      China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.

      Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...

      4 replies →

    • toss1  13 days ago

      I was not talking about false equivalence about their economic status; I was talking about falsely equating or 'whatabout-ing' their human rights status.

      And if you think that polls of life satisfaction are meaningful among a population who are forbidden to criticize their govt except in limited ways (e.g., local officials), I'd like to talk about some fantastic oceanfront land in Kansas...

      Economy? Of course people are happier to have a change from abject poverty, but it is entirely based on unfair export trade practices and highly leveraged investments both official and shadow-banking. At this point both are extremely fragile as the democracies start to catch on and the over-leverage starts to work against it. Even the massively over-inflated official growth numbers have tanked. On the economy, I'd choose to be in the USA over China, no hesitation.

      "Transforming entire continents"? You mean making extortionate loans to impoverished countries to build their own ports and extract resources? Again, that has limited runway as people figure out that it isn't such a good deal.

      And I notice that you entirely avoided the human rights citizen security issue. Yes, the US has corporate over-harvesting of data, and govt agencies can buy and/or demand access to the data. We also have court processes. Meanwhile, China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world, and mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more, but there are no public records. Again, no contest, USA is massively qualitatively and quantitatively better.

      Serious question, if you don't think so, why haven't you moved to China? I'm sure they'd welcome such an advocate.

      8 replies →

2OEH8eoCRo0  13 days ago

> my trust in the American legal system has been waning.

Why? We just watched a former POTUS and the current POTUS's son get convicted of felonies in courts with juries. Is there a better test of the legal system?