9 ms·

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media Can you say for sure, that the phone will not be seized, imaged and/or bugged at the airport/border? Anyways you are talking about differences in what they do with the data or the person to whom that data belongs and not contending the fact that tech companies from both the countries spy internationally.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  In America you can buy privacy if you really want it. Buy a laptop here, install linux on it, and use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    >In America See, that's what I'm trying to tell, What about 'Not in America'? Before I proceed further, I want to categorically state that I don't intend to come off as supporting privacy violations by one country vs another; My argument over this entire thread has been that it sucks for someone not in any of these countries as they all spy on us and it's taken for granted in this kind of discussions. That said, >use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Even the trillion dollar fruit company has been part of the program according to documents which hasn't been disputed. >This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored. So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? Btw, almost every outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive, several U.S. services work without a VPN e.g. iMessage, Skype etc. I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      >What about 'Not in America'? Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you. >So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? What are you talking about? >very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy. > several U.S. services work without a VPN Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network. > I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports. I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.
      - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
        >What are you talking about? This - > >Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.
  - KSteffensen 6y ago
    I'm fairly sure that if the NSA want your data they will get it, if necessary using rubber hose cryptanalysis. Regardless of legality.
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people?
      - srean 6y ago
        There are other 3 letter agencies and 3rd country jails for that and That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix I would not be hard to convince me that NSA inputs can place a person on these.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        When you find a way for a country to exist with 0 enemies, please let us all know.
        srean 6y ago
        Don't change goal posts now. I responded to your claim > I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people? that NSA can get people tortured or killed without much difficulty.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Do you think the NSA gives the orders on who to kill and who to kidnap?
        srean 6y ago
        "Order" not sure, "recommendations" very conceivable. Anyway the issue is not NSA issue is the freedoms and protections offered by the country. If NSA doesnt but CIA does, its not any better. You started with the claim that unlike China an US citizen is unlikely to get his/her privacy encroached on quoting all sorts of processes. I just gave examples where these processes didnt do much in preventing breaches of such encroachments. Add to that what we know is just a clouded view into the tip of the iceberg because of provisions of secrecy. If the clouded tip of the iceberg looks the way it does, it is not hard for someone not so deluded, or not so deprived of a full deck, to fill in what the rest of the iceberg could look like.
  - TheOperator 6y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a good number of commercial VPN services are monitored by the US of A.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
esperent 6y ago
This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind. You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out. I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance is the norm.
  - unionpivo 6y ago
    > The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way. After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them. Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respones to them, there were far more similarities than differences. (Well china was still worse, but not by as much as most USA people seem to think). The biggest difference in USA and china at the moments is that in USA some Politicians still listen to people (if only mostly out of self interest)
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of getting sent to mainland China to be imprisoned for decades, gang raped by cops in jail, and murdered while cops fake your suicide.
bamboozled 6y ago
I know, "land of the free, home of the brave"...right?
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
No, they just deny entry, or (try to) clone your data, insist on passwords/unlock of all sorts of devices, and so on. And email addresses/social media accounts, other online presences.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
US did more or less drone-strike this American and his 16 year-old son for criticizing the county on social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki The difference between 'recruiter' and a guy who sent some emails to some people is unfortunately a distinction that is up to some dweeb with more top-secret security clearances than medals on a North Korean general. I assume it's the same thing in China, they just have more dweebs that can disappear people.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  No... >"According to U.S. government officials, as well as being a senior recruiter and motivator, he was centrally involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda" We are better off with him dead. He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians.
  - ericns 6y ago
    Didn't Bush and Obama do the same thing with their allegiance to Saudi Arabia? Recruit a bunch of kids, send them to be maimed and kill civilians... Does your sense of morality and ethics end at the border, shouldn't these types of values be a bit more universal?
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    ...based on classified information that we are not allowed to see, and may or may not exist. You and I have no evidence that he was anything other than a loudmouth who bagged on the U.S. on the web and responded to emails from anyone who sent them. Remember when Saddam had those tractor-trailer biological weapons factories driving around Iraq ready to release clouds of Anthrax on American civilians? That was also based on classified information from a US government official. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-29/cia-confident-iraq-trailer-used-for-bio-weapons/1861196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-29/cia-confident-iraq-tr... Completely fabricated.
  - srean 6y ago
    > He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians. "not enough evidence for me to believe it" said someone on HN with your handle. Show us the evidence (a demand you seem to be fond of) and prove that in a public court, that's called due process. I will believe it then.
freeflight 6y ago
> America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. America won't even let you enter the country if you, or somebody on your feeds, criticized it on social media [0] People who are too vocal in their opposition to the US government, or just been in the wrong places at the wrong times, have been plenty known to be abducted into torture black sites [1], if not straight up killed by a drone strike because literal SKYNET [2] interpreted their meta-data [3] as that of a terrorist. And none of that is even accounting for the reality that the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, so if there's a place you will most likely be arrested during your vacation, then that's gonna be the US. But I guess it's easy to forget about these parts of US hegemony while pointing at China over "social credit scores" putting people on no-fly lists. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-states-social-media/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n... [3] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

>America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media Can you say for sure, that the phone will not be seized, imaged and/or bugged at the airport/border? Anyways you are talking about differences in what they do with the data or the person to whom that data belongs and not contending the fact that tech companies from both the countries spy internationally.

deathgrips 6y ago
In America you can buy privacy if you really want it. Buy a laptop here, install linux on it, and use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  >In America See, that's what I'm trying to tell, What about 'Not in America'? Before I proceed further, I want to categorically state that I don't intend to come off as supporting privacy violations by one country vs another; My argument over this entire thread has been that it sucks for someone not in any of these countries as they all spy on us and it's taken for granted in this kind of discussions. That said, >use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Even the trillion dollar fruit company has been part of the program according to documents which hasn't been disputed. >This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored. So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? Btw, almost every outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive, several U.S. services work without a VPN e.g. iMessage, Skype etc. I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    >What about 'Not in America'? Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you. >So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? What are you talking about? >very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy. > several U.S. services work without a VPN Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network. > I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports. I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.
    - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      >What are you talking about? This - > >Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
      - deathgrips 6y ago
        Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.
- KSteffensen 6y ago
  I'm fairly sure that if the NSA want your data they will get it, if necessary using rubber hose cryptanalysis. Regardless of legality.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people?
    - srean 6y ago
      There are other 3 letter agencies and 3rd country jails for that and That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix I would not be hard to convince me that NSA inputs can place a person on these.
      - deathgrips 6y ago
        When you find a way for a country to exist with 0 enemies, please let us all know.
        srean 6y ago
        Don't change goal posts now. I responded to your claim > I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people? that NSA can get people tortured or killed without much difficulty.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Do you think the NSA gives the orders on who to kill and who to kidnap?
        srean 6y ago
        "Order" not sure, "recommendations" very conceivable. Anyway the issue is not NSA issue is the freedoms and protections offered by the country. If NSA doesnt but CIA does, its not any better. You started with the claim that unlike China an US citizen is unlikely to get his/her privacy encroached on quoting all sorts of processes. I just gave examples where these processes didnt do much in preventing breaches of such encroachments. Add to that what we know is just a clouded view into the tip of the iceberg because of provisions of secrecy. If the clouded tip of the iceberg looks the way it does, it is not hard for someone not so deluded, or not so deprived of a full deck, to fill in what the rest of the iceberg could look like.
- TheOperator 6y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a good number of commercial VPN services are monitored by the US of A.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

esperent 6y ago

This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind. You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.

deathgrips 6y ago
The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out. I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance is the norm.
- unionpivo 6y ago
  > The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way. After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them. Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respones to them, there were far more similarities than differences. (Well china was still worse, but not by as much as most USA people seem to think). The biggest difference in USA and china at the moments is that in USA some Politicians still listen to people (if only mostly out of self interest)
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of getting sent to mainland China to be imprisoned for decades, gang raped by cops in jail, and murdered while cops fake your suicide.

bamboozled 6y ago

I know, "land of the free, home of the brave"...right?

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

No, they just deny entry, or (try to) clone your data, insist on passwords/unlock of all sorts of devices, and so on. And email addresses/social media accounts, other online presences.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

US did more or less drone-strike this American and his 16 year-old son for criticizing the county on social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki The difference between 'recruiter' and a guy who sent some emails to some people is unfortunately a distinction that is up to some dweeb with more top-secret security clearances than medals on a North Korean general. I assume it's the same thing in China, they just have more dweebs that can disappear people.

deathgrips 6y ago
No... >"According to U.S. government officials, as well as being a senior recruiter and motivator, he was centrally involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda" We are better off with him dead. He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians.
- ericns 6y ago
  Didn't Bush and Obama do the same thing with their allegiance to Saudi Arabia? Recruit a bunch of kids, send them to be maimed and kill civilians... Does your sense of morality and ethics end at the border, shouldn't these types of values be a bit more universal?
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  ...based on classified information that we are not allowed to see, and may or may not exist. You and I have no evidence that he was anything other than a loudmouth who bagged on the U.S. on the web and responded to emails from anyone who sent them. Remember when Saddam had those tractor-trailer biological weapons factories driving around Iraq ready to release clouds of Anthrax on American civilians? That was also based on classified information from a US government official. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-29/cia-confident-iraq-trailer-used-for-bio-weapons/1861196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-29/cia-confident-iraq-tr... Completely fabricated.
- srean 6y ago
  > He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians. "not enough evidence for me to believe it" said someone on HN with your handle. Show us the evidence (a demand you seem to be fond of) and prove that in a public court, that's called due process. I will believe it then.

freeflight 6y ago

> America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. America won't even let you enter the country if you, or somebody on your feeds, criticized it on social media [0] People who are too vocal in their opposition to the US government, or just been in the wrong places at the wrong times, have been plenty known to be abducted into torture black sites [1], if not straight up killed by a drone strike because literal SKYNET [2] interpreted their meta-data [3] as that of a terrorist. And none of that is even accounting for the reality that the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, so if there's a place you will most likely be arrested during your vacation, then that's gonna be the US. But I guess it's easy to forget about these parts of US hegemony while pointing at China over "social credit scores" putting people on no-fly lists. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-states-social-media/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n... [3] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...