5 ms·

The US wants to be more like China and the Soviet Union. My first hint was Snowden.

by bboygravity 4y ago

ghostDancer 4y ago
[flagged]
akomtu 4y ago
United Soviets?
Dah00n 4y ago
None of those had the surveillance of its citizens that the US does though. Maybe including some “tech inflation” Stasi of DDR might be up there but neither USSR nor PRC has/had anything as massive as the US.
- _cenw 4y ago
  The PRC has a lot more CCTV, slightly less per capacita, but that's irrelevant if you account for density. They also have a lot more means to aggregate information at the municipal level and turn it into actionables, and they do so pretty openly. Meanwhile US cities and police departments are still in love with a glorified spreadsheet provider. Not that I'm advocating for any of this, but saying the PRC has less, or even substantially less surveilance than the US is a pretty laughable proposition.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > PRC anything as massive as the US Really? I assume domestically China engages in surveillance on a much higher scale than the US.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    It absolutely does. Ten seconds of reading the Wikipedia page on the Great Firewall will show you that GP has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
    - Dah00n 4y ago
      US not only have systems in place at home it also gathers data in other countries (UK, DK, DE, etc.) on US citizens. PRC has nothing like this that has been discovered so far.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Stalin wanted it so much, he even had entire research institute dedicated to automatic voice recognition problem, staffed with jailed engineers, and utilizing vacuum tubes electronics (Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle).
- baremetal 4y ago
  The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees who were assisted by 170,000 full-time unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter); together these made up 1 in 63 (nearly 2%) of the entire East German population.[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_East_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_East_Germ...
  - lenkite 4y ago
    Looks like Stasi were small peanuts compared to U.S. security agencies - which also have supercomputing at their fingers.
- throw10920 4y ago
  This is completely false. China requires that all service providers automatically decrypt all of their data for all users for the PRC, and the Great Firewall surveils and controls the vast majority of network traffic in China. The US has nothing remotely comparable to either of these things. You either don't know much about China, or don't know much about the US.
  - cryptonym 4y ago
    Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS. Most of the information required to compare is not public, maybe China got a better equipment and funding than USA... but even if that's the case, it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated.
    - throw10920 4y ago
      > Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS. Still not relevant. Covert exploitation of cryptographic weaknesses that can be easily patched leading to a limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data". They're not remotely comparable. > it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated Nobody is saying that.
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        PRISM is literally the state forcing you to decrypt and hand over data. I'm sure the CCP has their own potemkin legal system - the FISA courts are smoke and dressing just the same.
        throw10920 4y ago
        Please read my comment again. > limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data". This still describes the difference between PRISM and the CCP's system. It doesn't matter if "the CCP has their own potemkin legal system" - the fact is that the NSA only (allegedly) takes a very small set of records and providers get to see every one of them, where's the CCP's system takes literally everything. Plus, we can look at the massive differences between the CCP and the US in every other way - the Great Firewall's real-time monitoring and censorship of all communication in the country, for instance, as well as the total lack of constitutional rights to privacy that the Chinese people have - and pretty reasonably conclude that the FISA courts are going to be more rigorous than whatever China has.
DuckFeathers 4y ago
Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US. They just didn't copy the "freedom" idea. They mostly didn't do it because they didn't have to... so they were very lucky. With modern technology, ordinary people got too powerful and it would be very easy to find out that the state is outright lying to them about how their own country works and they wouldn't be too happy about it. As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much. They can tell the truth about the enemy once in a while and that is mostly enough. If one of them was a superpower though, it would be a different story. They would have to engage in a lot of deception and with modern technology, people would find out that their leaders are full of it. Not that it is a problem, the peasants do eventually cope with reality... but it's just that it doesn't work very smoothly all the time.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US Do you really believe in this or are you just saying this? Mass surveillance was a thing in the USSR decades 30-50 years earlier than in the US. Also much more effective too... Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag (they toned it down and switch to psich hospitial after the 60s). > leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much tanks go brr... amirite comrade ?
  - ghostDancer 4y ago
    Never forget, also on the other side of the wall, East Germany the paradigm of control and spying on their own citizens.
  - DuckFeathers 4y ago
    > Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag You're thinking Snowden and Assange. In the Soviet Union, they were sent to the gulags for spying for the enemy.
- kwere 4y ago
  > As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much The only satisfied people would be the subsidized nomenklatura. Normal people do notice the aftereffects of de facto Kleptocracies aka the destruction of any organization, but who cares? so the common man developed apathy as a form of civil resistance (like laying flat in china today)
amelius 4y ago
Level playing field.
vehemenz 4y ago
The Snowden affair was the first time I've seen the mainstream news outlets do a complete 180 on its coverage in the span of hours. Initially, the serious (non Fox News) outlets were concerned about the overreach by the government and seemed supportive of the leaks. By afternoon, they were all attacking Greenwald, Poitras, and Snowden on national security grounds.
- asveikau 4y ago
  Greenwald has gone pretty nuts on his own since then. Unpopular opinion here: I think Snowden rightfully got people to pay more attention to cryptography, and that's good, but I always thought there was something about his story that didn't add up. Defecting to Moscow is shitty, too, especially considering what happened later.
  - infinitezest 4y ago
    Defecting to Moscow? I know he lives there but what leads you to believe he's defected to Russia? Is there any evidence that this has happened?
    - asveikau 4y ago
      How much do you know about Russia? A high profile political-ish person cannot live there without interference from government. You are naive on the subject or deliberately lying if you do not believe that is true. Information on this is easily accessible to you. Especially after Ukraine, when there's so many stories of prominent Russians being labelled "foreign agents" by their government for merely having opinions. It is not an exaggeration to say it's like Nazi Germany there now. Even well before, they were doing political assassinations at home and abroad and false flags in Chechnya. Snowden and Greenwald both are clearly on the wrong side of that issue. It was clear even in 2013 if you were paying attention that Putin's Russia was less free than the United States. So it's a very, very strange thing to do to move there after being concerned about civil liberties.
      - 4y ago

The US wants to be more like China and the Soviet Union. My first hint was Snowden.

ghostDancer 4y ago

[flagged]

akomtu 4y ago

United Soviets?

Dah00n 4y ago

None of those had the surveillance of its citizens that the US does though. Maybe including some “tech inflation” Stasi of DDR might be up there but neither USSR nor PRC has/had anything as massive as the US.

_cenw 4y ago
The PRC has a lot more CCTV, slightly less per capacita, but that's irrelevant if you account for density. They also have a lot more means to aggregate information at the municipal level and turn it into actionables, and they do so pretty openly. Meanwhile US cities and police departments are still in love with a glorified spreadsheet provider. Not that I'm advocating for any of this, but saying the PRC has less, or even substantially less surveilance than the US is a pretty laughable proposition.
qwytw 4y ago
> PRC anything as massive as the US Really? I assume domestically China engages in surveillance on a much higher scale than the US.
- throw10920 4y ago
  It absolutely does. Ten seconds of reading the Wikipedia page on the Great Firewall will show you that GP has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
  - Dah00n 4y ago
    US not only have systems in place at home it also gathers data in other countries (UK, DK, DE, etc.) on US citizens. PRC has nothing like this that has been discovered so far.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Stalin wanted it so much, he even had entire research institute dedicated to automatic voice recognition problem, staffed with jailed engineers, and utilizing vacuum tubes electronics (Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle).
baremetal 4y ago
The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees who were assisted by 170,000 full-time unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter); together these made up 1 in 63 (nearly 2%) of the entire East German population.[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_East_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_East_Germ...
- lenkite 4y ago
  Looks like Stasi were small peanuts compared to U.S. security agencies - which also have supercomputing at their fingers.
throw10920 4y ago
This is completely false. China requires that all service providers automatically decrypt all of their data for all users for the PRC, and the Great Firewall surveils and controls the vast majority of network traffic in China. The US has nothing remotely comparable to either of these things. You either don't know much about China, or don't know much about the US.
- cryptonym 4y ago
  Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS. Most of the information required to compare is not public, maybe China got a better equipment and funding than USA... but even if that's the case, it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    > Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS. Still not relevant. Covert exploitation of cryptographic weaknesses that can be easily patched leading to a limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data". They're not remotely comparable. > it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated Nobody is saying that.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      PRISM is literally the state forcing you to decrypt and hand over data. I'm sure the CCP has their own potemkin legal system - the FISA courts are smoke and dressing just the same.
      - throw10920 4y ago
        Please read my comment again. > limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data". This still describes the difference between PRISM and the CCP's system. It doesn't matter if "the CCP has their own potemkin legal system" - the fact is that the NSA only (allegedly) takes a very small set of records and providers get to see every one of them, where's the CCP's system takes literally everything. Plus, we can look at the massive differences between the CCP and the US in every other way - the Great Firewall's real-time monitoring and censorship of all communication in the country, for instance, as well as the total lack of constitutional rights to privacy that the Chinese people have - and pretty reasonably conclude that the FISA courts are going to be more rigorous than whatever China has.

DuckFeathers 4y ago

Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US. They just didn't copy the "freedom" idea. They mostly didn't do it because they didn't have to... so they were very lucky. With modern technology, ordinary people got too powerful and it would be very easy to find out that the state is outright lying to them about how their own country works and they wouldn't be too happy about it. As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much. They can tell the truth about the enemy once in a while and that is mostly enough. If one of them was a superpower though, it would be a different story. They would have to engage in a lot of deception and with modern technology, people would find out that their leaders are full of it. Not that it is a problem, the peasants do eventually cope with reality... but it's just that it doesn't work very smoothly all the time.

qwytw 4y ago
> Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US Do you really believe in this or are you just saying this? Mass surveillance was a thing in the USSR decades 30-50 years earlier than in the US. Also much more effective too... Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag (they toned it down and switch to psich hospitial after the 60s). > leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much tanks go brr... amirite comrade ?
- ghostDancer 4y ago
  Never forget, also on the other side of the wall, East Germany the paradigm of control and spying on their own citizens.
- DuckFeathers 4y ago
  > Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag You're thinking Snowden and Assange. In the Soviet Union, they were sent to the gulags for spying for the enemy.
kwere 4y ago
> As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much The only satisfied people would be the subsidized nomenklatura. Normal people do notice the aftereffects of de facto Kleptocracies aka the destruction of any organization, but who cares? so the common man developed apathy as a form of civil resistance (like laying flat in china today)

amelius 4y ago

Level playing field.

vehemenz 4y ago

The Snowden affair was the first time I've seen the mainstream news outlets do a complete 180 on its coverage in the span of hours. Initially, the serious (non Fox News) outlets were concerned about the overreach by the government and seemed supportive of the leaks. By afternoon, they were all attacking Greenwald, Poitras, and Snowden on national security grounds.

asveikau 4y ago
Greenwald has gone pretty nuts on his own since then. Unpopular opinion here: I think Snowden rightfully got people to pay more attention to cryptography, and that's good, but I always thought there was something about his story that didn't add up. Defecting to Moscow is shitty, too, especially considering what happened later.
- infinitezest 4y ago
  Defecting to Moscow? I know he lives there but what leads you to believe he's defected to Russia? Is there any evidence that this has happened?
  - asveikau 4y ago
    How much do you know about Russia? A high profile political-ish person cannot live there without interference from government. You are naive on the subject or deliberately lying if you do not believe that is true. Information on this is easily accessible to you. Especially after Ukraine, when there's so many stories of prominent Russians being labelled "foreign agents" by their government for merely having opinions. It is not an exaggeration to say it's like Nazi Germany there now. Even well before, they were doing political assassinations at home and abroad and false flags in Chechnya. Snowden and Greenwald both are clearly on the wrong side of that issue. It was clear even in 2013 if you were paying attention that Putin's Russia was less free than the United States. So it's a very, very strange thing to do to move there after being concerned about civil liberties.
    - 4y ago