4 ms·

The main difference is legal/constitutional. Yet they use almost the same tools.

by 131012 8y ago

api 8y ago
Legal/constitutional is the only difference that really matters. The tech is globally available to anyone. The law determines how it may be used. Overall I think mass surveillance and other cyber-intrusions into civil liberties can only be realistically solved by legislation. It's far too easy to spy on a people who insist on carrying around little location-aware transponders and posting all their activities to the Internet. It's legislation that limits this, and much more importantly limits what it's legal for the government or private actors to do with this information.
adventured 8y ago
The main difference is cultural in fact. The legal / constitutional aspect entirely derives from cultural underpinnings. If you remove the cultural, you remove all support for the existing constitutional protections and the politicians in DC will promptly begin revoking rights at will. The reason China can't support a rights based Constitution as in eg the US or parts of Europe, is due to the lack of a culture that overwhelmingly believes in the premise. There are pockets of resistance in China, that push back against the tyranny, the problem is that they're modest and fairly easy to contain. If Trump passed an executive order to revoke freedom of speech tomorrow, he'd be impeached by his own party, and there'd be tens of millions of people protesting in the streets across the country. Trump would be lucky if his own military didn't coup him at that point, their first oath is to the Constitution, not the Presidency or a party. That's an intense cultural underpinning, which China is lacking. To overly simplify it: if you have cultural protections, then the people revolt and get very pissed off, when politicians try to take away rights. The culture is the real shield for a constitution, without which it's just worthless paper that can be shredded. The people have a viseral reaction, it's instantaneous, because the culture is in their blood so to speak. Politicians in the US constantly test that live wire to see what they can get away with. They typically have to be extremely sneaky about what they do, or use emotional events as cover, if they want to take some ground on rights (eg the Patriot Act et al.).

The main difference is legal/constitutional. Yet they use almost the same tools.

by 131012 8y ago

The main difference is legal/constitutional. Yet they use almost the same tools.

api 8y ago

Legal/constitutional is the only difference that really matters. The tech is globally available to anyone. The law determines how it may be used. Overall I think mass surveillance and other cyber-intrusions into civil liberties can only be realistically solved by legislation. It's far too easy to spy on a people who insist on carrying around little location-aware transponders and posting all their activities to the Internet. It's legislation that limits this, and much more importantly limits what it's legal for the government or private actors to do with this information.

adventured 8y ago

The main difference is cultural in fact. The legal / constitutional aspect entirely derives from cultural underpinnings. If you remove the cultural, you remove all support for the existing constitutional protections and the politicians in DC will promptly begin revoking rights at will. The reason China can't support a rights based Constitution as in eg the US or parts of Europe, is due to the lack of a culture that overwhelmingly believes in the premise. There are pockets of resistance in China, that push back against the tyranny, the problem is that they're modest and fairly easy to contain. If Trump passed an executive order to revoke freedom of speech tomorrow, he'd be impeached by his own party, and there'd be tens of millions of people protesting in the streets across the country. Trump would be lucky if his own military didn't coup him at that point, their first oath is to the Constitution, not the Presidency or a party. That's an intense cultural underpinning, which China is lacking. To overly simplify it: if you have cultural protections, then the people revolt and get very pissed off, when politicians try to take away rights. The culture is the real shield for a constitution, without which it's just worthless paper that can be shredded. The people have a viseral reaction, it's instantaneous, because the culture is in their blood so to speak. Politicians in the US constantly test that live wire to see what they can get away with. They typically have to be extremely sneaky about what they do, or use emotional events as cover, if they want to take some ground on rights (eg the Patriot Act et al.).