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> ToTok amounts to the latest escalation in a digital arms race among wealthy authoritarian governments, interviews with current and former American foreign off
by asdfman123 7y ago
> ToTok amounts to the latest escalation in a digital arms race among wealthy authoritarian governments, interviews with current and former American foreign officials and a forensic investigation showed. The governments are pursuing more effective and convenient methods to spy on foreign adversaries, criminal and terrorist networks, journalists and critics — efforts that have ensnared people all over the world in their surveillance nets.
So... um... how does the fact that the NSA monitors everything we do square with this? Is it only an arms race when other governments try to do it, too?
(A more low effort response would be "Me trying to uninstall apps that the US government monitors" and a GIF link to that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where she throws her cell phone into the fountain.)
- moron4hire 7y ago> Is it only an arms race when other governments try to do it, too? Yes, that's literally what defines an "arms race".
- asdfman123 7y agoI guess my question is whether or not the New York Times considers the US to be a wealthy authoritarian government.
- smt88 7y agoWealthy, yes. If the US is considered authoritarian then the word starts to lose any useful meaning.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWhat is the useful meaning it's supposed to have?
- yowlingcat 7y agoA charitable reading could be "governments that uphold high liberty regimes as a nation, such as the US". Parts of that assertion are reasonable to question. A less charitable reading could be "governments that engage in the same global atrocities as my own, but which are on the other side." This reading is also a reasonable questioning.
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- Wowfunhappy 7y agoauthoritarian, adjective favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom –New Oxford American Dictionary In the US, Steven Colbert can use public airwaves to make fun of the president every night, without going to jail.
- munk-a 7y agoMany heavily authoritarian regimes in the past have defended comedians as bastions of free-speech promoting those that do little harm to the system while spurning those that spread truly subversive messages. I think we also need to acknowledge the fact that the president is hardly the government - America is a gigantic bureaucracy and our government is primarily composed of civil servants who keep the lights on. If Steven Colbert (similar to his better know a district series on the old show) started to tear down agencies within departments, going after Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, National Nuclear Security Administration or Foreign Claims Settlement Commission[1] - then he'd actually be subverting the government. The executive branch is both structurally minor and, IMO, partially exists to be the target of blame and praise so that the rest of the government can get on with their business. 1. Random agencies pulled from agencies under the departments listed here https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/d https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/d
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago> If Steven Colbert (similar to his better know a district series on the old show) started to tear down agencies within departments, going after Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, National Nuclear Security Administration or Foreign Claims Settlement Commission[1] - then he'd actually be subverting the government. The executive branch is both structurally minor and, IMO, partially exists to be the target of blame and praise so that the rest of the government can get on with their business. Well, if Colbert started running those types of investigations, do you think is show would get pulled off the air? I'm pretty confident it would not. John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, while not a broadcast show, might serve as a better example in that respect. They've run a lot of pieces which are critical of a wide variety of government agencies. And they don't just crack jokes, they get into the weeds. And then there's outlets explicitly dedicated to investigative journalism, like ProPublica, and many of the major newspapers. None of this could exist in the UEA, or China, or Russia, etc.
- geogra4 7y agoHow could a country with the largest prison population in the world not fall into at least some definition of authoritarian?
- VWWHFSfQ 7y agoBecause USA doesn't execute prisoners at the rate China or Russia does
- munk-a 7y agoThose prisoners are being deprived of their lives - and I'd guess in many times wrongly since the US incarcerates twice as many people per capita than Russia or China.
- caseysoftware 7y agoDo you believe the figures Russia and China publish? Alternatively, if a country had a high rate of executions and/or "disappearing" people, what would happen to that country's incarceration rate? Alternatively, is the term "incarceration" only applied to people convicted of a crime? Would re-education camps count towards the incarceration rate?
- munk-a 7y agoSorry I missed including my source, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... (and yes, it's probably got a quite high inaccuracy, but there aren't other easy to ingest sources I found)
- maqp 7y agoUS has basically modernized slavery with the for-profit prison system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHz2Hmq7soo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHz2Hmq7soo
- baddox 7y agoWell, yeah, historically and now "authoritarian government" is pretty redundant. The only meaning it might have is to draw an arbitrary line and consider only the governments on one side of the line to be "authoritarian," but when people do that they seldom bother to articulate where they're drawing that line and why. So I completely agree that the word in practice does not usually have much useful meaning.
- mindslight 7y agoJust as how a traditional dictator does not dwell on the autocratic authoritarianism of their country, the New York Times does not ponder the democratic authoritarianism of the US.
- ailideex 7y agoI would guess unless someone actually agrees to help the NSA they cannot do much to defeat real E2E encryption schemes used in things like Wire/Telegram/Signal/Matrix/Tox - and with some of them that are open source such schemes to help the NSA will be very difficult. I don't think this quite the same as what UAE allegedly did with ToTok.
- zaphirplane 7y agoOr a law is passed / directive issued. See the cryptography restriction in the 90s and the recent lotus notes backdoor story here. Even the old stories about the blackberry messaging keys requirements in various countries
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