bigmonads's comments

I reject the accusation of "whataboutism". Let's take those in order.

"Why have I made 5~6 comments in the thread?" It's an interesting topic that I've spent over 5 years researching.

"Why are you talking about the United States in a China thread?" I think this comment captures it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185364

I think the point of coldtea's comment is that:

- We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard

- We're talking about others (Chinese) needing to rebel, blaming this on brainwashing, without adknowledging our own inability and unwillingness to act, without being willing to label this brainwashing

- We're building over the course of increasingly ignorant veiled-criticism posts of foreign cultures a dog-whistle for Chinese racism within our tech culture

- We're narrowly conceptualizing the issues fundamental to these technologies, spending our energy on exasperation that contributes to nationalistic sentiment, rather than addressing the global systemic abuse

- Our "blindspot" of admitting our own state the abuse of information fundamentally carves out, via the course of international law and sovereignty, the justification for other countries to do the exact same

In essence: fixing this kind of thing starts at home in the United States. Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.

False equivalence AND conspiracy theory? Lol.

In order...

"False equivalence": Nope, not saying they are equivalent.

"Conspiracy theory": Nope, read the reporting on the Snowden documents, fusion centers, legal cases involving use of surveillance, statements by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's all the same": I think what America is doing is both worse and of a different kind.

Definitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications?

This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.

Looks like.

China could probably go much further. In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you). Much of that surveillance is automatic, and fed into police threat scores and FBI databases based off of online conversations (like this one) and other information (including financials, purchase history, social circle, etc).

Now, in the United States, if you want to disrupt some other kind of corruption (say, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists, and the FBI will infiltrate and seek the arrests of that behavior as well, enforcing the strict relationship that wealthy families have in the enforcement of American societal structure.

China's population was 1.386 billion in 2017.

Do you mean 10% of the subpopulation pertinent to the region?

I'd genuinely love to hear your analysis of the American surveillance state.

Next headline "America Could Use Medical Data to Blackmail Chinese, Chinese Report Says"

I mean, I wouldn't trade my life for almost any other life - even a life of greater wealth and power.

But to take the point you've made and work through its conclusions: Hacker News skews heavily privileged male high-income engineer, and likely wouldn't trade their lives to live as an _American_ female, much less a Detroiter, Hispanic laborer, or American prison inmate.

Living in the world's sole superpower (most of HN) has, of course, its own advantages that we don't need to enumerate.

Chinese future looks a lot brighter according to most political forecasters, economists, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Century

The cartoon at the top of this article (squinty eyes, fatty short figure) makes me uncomfortable, as it edges pretty close to old racist depictions of Asians and Blacks from half a century ago.

That said, the article itself takes a negative and biased approach to evaluating China's government. China's system seeks, and achieves, representation of its people through a variation of a social contract that has lasted - and been updated and modernized - through thousands of years.

China's current Communist Party is measured against specific outcomes, the livelihoods, outlooks, and possibilities of the people of China, which have never looked better (the next century has been dubbed by historians the "Chinese Century" based on the demographic, financial, cultural, and technological success of China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Century). That same party is measured against corruption, and recent efforts in the country to excise grift and nepotism have given its government new efficiency, purpose and effectivity.

Old Western power centers (Europe pre-WWII and America post-) may have some anxiety about the the relative loss of leadership that global scandals, lost legitimacy, financial crashes, and systemic corruption have wrought in recent years. Its with this anxiety that I find articles like this written: China is, and has been, doing something right, and the West needs to look at its own failings and correct them to succeed and keep pace with 21st century dynamism.

In the United States:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#Controversy_and_cr...

> Among the complaints about the No Fly List is the use of credit reports in calculating the risk score.

http://time.com/4966125/police-departments-algorithms-chicag...

See also: DoD's online propaganda-at-scale research, and the AI techniques behind https://www.darpa.mil/program/social-media-in-strategic-comm...

One of the key focal points of the DoD's research is the identification of the topology of social networks and the flow of trust, information, and rumors. The topology and the chokepoints across it which information is distributed are leverage point where ideas can be contended, disrupted, replaced, challenged or seeded. Doing this at scale requires minimal human operation - only enough to convince the targetted population and narrative centers that the propaganda content is legitimate social traffic - and also information systems to infer microculture so that the information programming can be fit inside the moral, judgemental, human, religious and social (e.g. politeness) parameters from large quantities of communication surveillance.

That's amazing. I always assumed that the Hajj to Mecca was the largest.

If you read the reporting on the subject, you'll learn it is from government pressure.

I agree with you, and think its endemic of the app ecosystem.

It mentions it in the article. Supporters keep putting it back up and Apple continuously takes it down (under pressure of the US gov).

For context, the app was created to track human rights abuses during the disclosure of the US's covert surveillance and assassination program in the Middle East. This was a scandal for the United States because it was disclosed that they were killing innocent people with knowledge and through reclassification, even killing children (internally using the terminology "fun sized terrorists").

The pressure to remove the app was brought to Apple during a sweep to control the scandal and public perception of the program.

(Given the public conversation has moves far past the scandal, and the Trump administration continues the indiscriminate assassinations, that censorship program does seem to have succeeded)

Reminds me of Apple's censorship of US assassinations: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just...

There's a reason why centrally curated platforms are dangerous, and why Free Software Principals reject them.

What's with the downvotes? More censorship?

As the author of the above comment, yes confirmed that is how I intended it.

Looking for them.

I got this from following reports and dialogues from American Think Tanks (primarily the Center for Strategic and International Studies). Essentially over the past decade there's been fairly regular dialogue between the British government and China regarding online, radio and publication public engagement.

There's been some British universities, thinktanks and others "accused" of helping China (e.g. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/westminster-and-kings-acc...) but from strategy side of the house (at least at CSIS, which is American) there hasn't been a lot of angst or fretting over it. I'll look for some specific CSIS reports.

Here are some articles to get you started.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/1209...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-w...

National data from intelligence agencies are provided to municipal police through "fusion centers". Different cities provide their own data into these centers (e.g. Seattle recently built and tore down a city-wide camera surveillance system) which are consumed in the other direction. Threat scoring software use various data feeds including those from social media platforms.