Considering that China has the great firewall due to it's government censorship I'm a bit shocked to see this as the top comment. The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.

I don’t fully understand your argument. Because China has the great firewall they’re worse? I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way. I agree the firewall is a human rights issue in the way that US prisons are a human rights issue, but I’d be hesitant to say that because China is bad in this one way, the fact that they perform surveillance is made worse. The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware. We keep 0-day backdoors in computer hardware that was designed here, and there’s some uncertainty as to whether we arranged for those backdoors or only found them (NSLs make it difficult/impossible to know).

Further you dismiss the parent comment as implying the US and China’s surveillance are equivalent, but I don’t see that as the claim. There is a lot of shocked surprise in the news when we find that China is doing something we don’t like with our data or computers, but we ignore that the NSA builds massive data centers for data on the global population, we kill people based on that data, and we also engage in a global hacking war. And I think it’s important to make sure that when we talk about China, we’re also willing to talk about the US. If we never talk about what we do, someone else’s bad behavior will look warped.

The US and China are not equivalent, but it’s hard to talk about one fairly in this context without mentioning the other.

> "I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way."

Really? One of the Great Firewall's primary use cases is to prevent data that could be used for surveillance to leave the nation.

China prohibits all sorts of data from leaving through the Great Firewall, such as telemetry.

> "The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware."

We are definitely the leader when it comes to foreign surveillance. When it comes to domestic, however, China is easily winning. They don't even hide it -- they require practically all interesting data to be available for their use by law.

Doesn’t the US literally require huge amounts of data to be kept by corporations while also ensuring that through National Security Letters they can get what they need any time? Hillary Clinton actually campaigned on expanding “public private partnerships” for “data security”. She wanted to make it easier for corporations to share bulk data with the government without reprocussions.

As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable depending on who's committing the act... and how much or how often they do it and for what reasons. If it unjust, it's unjust; it doesn't matter if its China or any of the Five Eyes members doing it, it's still just as wrong.

> As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable ... depending ... for what reasons. If it's unjust, it's unjust

I don't really agree with this. Intentions matter; the act of breaking into a house is way different if it's done to stop an in-progress assault vs. commit one.

It can obviously be argued in the actual scenario we're discussing how benevolent / evil / potentially unknowable the actors we're talking about actually are, but I don't think intention is irrelevant.

Justification means it is not unjust. That's the point. That's going to vary depending on the culture in which the violation is occurring - as it should.

It's not really the intention that matters, but the circumstances motivating the action initially.

Example: murder in the course of self defence as "justifiable homicide" or the warranted tapping of someone's phone under supervision of the judiciary

The issue occurs here because those traditional national lines, which happen to also include cultural lines, are themselves being violated and we have no effective incidental means of addressing or justifying the act.

I definitely disagree with this. I'd change af's analogy though. There is a difference between someone breaking into your house and looking around and someone breaking into your house and confiscating things. Neither are good, they are just different degrees of bad.

Maybe internally, China and Russia have worse freedom of speech.

But what does THAT have to do with using data vaccuumed up from overseas?

Microsoft Windows takes all your passwords and the CIA or FBI can legally give them a warrant to get the data. The NSA also probably has a nice backdoor.

Why would another country be OK with this? Especially for sensitive info.

Same for other operating systems.

Are you saying that since the US has better freedom of speech for its own citizens, therefore trusting it not to do anything harmful to people in another country makes way more sense?

To clarify, sorry too many people to reply to: I don't like surveillance. Stepping away from any tribal loyalty I might have to the five eyes I think you can qualitatively state that China is objectively a more totalitarian state hostile to the hacker ethos/freedom/pick your term for the terminal value most of us seem to agree on, which is what I was getting at with the great firewall. I am less worried about these less(least?) bad states collecting data then I am about the worse super-power doing so.

Edit: to->too d'oh

In a nutshell: DJI is primed to obey authorities. It's in their genes. They're happy to geofence your drone for the simple reason of, 'we were asked,' which means that it isn't your drone. Sure, it seems reasonable when they keep you from straying into an airfield, but just wait until they prevent you from filming the violent crackdown on a protest.

Although I do think that there's something to the idea of, 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.'

> 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.

Don't forget parallel construction and planted evidence.

> 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.'

I don't know if you're referring to the US or China

I guess he's referring to "the country I don't currently reside in"

The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as shown in the Apple vs. FBI case after the San Bernardino attack. My understanding is that China has no such privacy protections, either in principle or in practice.

Yeah, it's not like the U.S. can get a top-secret blanket order for call records of everyone in the country or anything. /s

>The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure

i don't think these protections apply to the people outside of US. The same way whatever laws China has wouldn't apply to for example the people in US, ie. outside of China.

Also it reminded about that typical arrangement when UK spies on the people inside US at the request of US government and vise versa in order to workaround those domestic legal protections.

That last part doesn't happen: it's part of the intelligence agreements not to do that.

The snowden leaks, 4 years ago, offer proof that this happened, and you still deny it?

Officials of the BND admitted it in a parliamentary hearing, too.

What proof did Snowden show of this?

I don’t have his documents on hand, but I’d instead recommend you read the transscripts of the NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss of the German Bundestag, which investigated the NSA and BND affairs. They’re official government documents, and are transscripts of people testifying under oath.

The head of the BND stated that the BND did not record any information about Germans, and the NSA did not record any information about Americans, but that the BND shared whatever it collected about Americans with the NSA, and in reverse.

None. People refuse to let this myth die, yet cannot provide any evidence. It is very strange.

Would you have thought of all Snowden revealed by yourself if he hadn't?

That agreement is to not to spy on each other against each other's will. That is completely different from spying on each other's domestic targets at each other's request/will to workaround domestic no spying and privacy protections laws.

Explain how anyone would think that works. You can't get around the 4th amendment by directing someone else to violate it.

UK spying on US citizens doesn't violate US Constitution and the 4th in particular which naturally applies only to US government and the people on US soil. And thus they do it that way. UK obviously has all the rights to listen, record, etc on telecommunications of all of the foreigners, including US people on US soil as long as the traffic leaves the US (and even if not - i don't think they bother to pay attention to such a small detail as long as they are doing it from comfortable office in London :).

>Explain how anyone would think that works.

US government lawyers explained how torture is legal. Compare to that, the circumventing of the 4th by means of allies doing the actual spying ... i'd be surprised if they even bothered to explain it away.

Sure but the US also has a very broad definition of "reasonable", where just about any kind of information you share through or with a business is a "business record" and doesn't require a warrant.

Not to mention the blanket surveillance, use of Stingrays without a warrant and near total lack of privacy law.

The US might not be as _bad_ as China but it's still far from _good_.

Those protections apply only to US citizens: the 4th amendment doesn't apply to foreigners. US ‘authorities’ arrogated to themselves the right to siphon the data and metadata of people around the world for this exact reason.

This means that based on the current applied interpretation of the norms, there are two classes of people: those who ‘deserve’ rights, and have them, and those who do not. And if you are a foreigner, you do not.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

No, the Fourth Amendment applies to non-citizens, even those who are in the US illegally.

> The court ruled in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) that all criminal charge-related elements of the Constitution's amendments (the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and the 14th) such as search and seizure, self-incrimination, trial by jury and due process, protect non-citizens, legally or illegally present.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes...

(I am not an expert and would appreciate a better source or explanation.)

Thank you for the clarification.

This is still limited to people on us soil :/

A great example of how reasonable is this when you need to unlock your phone, laptop, etc. at the US border and hand it over. I guess we have a very different definition of reasonable.

> The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure

> The U.S. has strong legal language against unreasonable search and seizure which is usually ignored when inconvenient for the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Fixed that for you.

San Bernardino did demonstrate this to some degree, but I could easily have imagined that event pushing Congress to pass some pretty draconian legislation if the FBI hadn't found an alternate path into the phone, things got pretty heated with that one. I'd go as far as to say the surprisingly tough public stance Tim Cook took against the government's position was pretty unusual too.

I would be worried about what would happen if a similar highly public spat over an encryption issue happens under the current US administration - it's abundantly clear that the politics of this issue and the facts are not in alignment, Trump would doubtless adore the publicity of it. At any rate, I'd imagine San Bernadino is almost certainly not the last time this is going to be a national political issue, in the USA or elsewhere.

This of course pales in comparison to China though.

> The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure

So long as you stay the hell away from an airport...

Yeah, unless you're in the constitution-free zone within what is it, 100 miles of a port?

patriot act is rather broad for ensuring strong legal protections.

The concern isn't about US consumers, it's about the US government (law enforcement, defence, etc.) using the drones and having data sent back.

That sounds excellent to me. China could just start publishing these data, and then we lowly USA citizens could have some idea what the cops are getting up to with these drones. I'm anticipating a fair amount of "pretty woman undressed in her bathroom" footage...

Nice use of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Bad analogy with the quadcopter, plug a few cheap parts together and load the open source flight controller software and you are ready to fly. Much harder to build/compile a phone atm, I haven't even seen where this is possible without an inordinate amount of time and expertise.

Android phones are not widely used for surveying critical infastructure unlike these drones. The fact that a Chinese product sends data to China is hardly surprising, but US intel is warning that such a thing is dangerous considering what these drones are frequently used for.

And those Android phones are made by companies around the world. Samsung phones send data to South Korea, Hauwei to China, etc... Some Android phones are sold without Google's apps and send nothing to their servers, so you're not really correct on that.

CopperheadOS and LineageOS are examples of android-derived mobile OS's that don't send a firehose of data back to the mothership.

>But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative.

In what universe is LineageOS not a viable alternative?

LOS does nothing for proprietary binary blobs included on phones.

But it does do something for this:

>owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access.

At least as much as you can while carrying around a radio transmitter. Replicant is also a thing.

I'm not sure if EU customers send data back to US - please correct me if I'm wrong.

Why would you put a "(sic)" [sic] in your own comment?

It's not uncommon to use "sic" as a sort of irony punctuation mark.

Interesting. I've always known "sic" by it's canonical usage: to point out an error in someone else's quotation (perhaps with some sneer).

Wikipedia actually shows this newer usage of it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic:

  "Ironic use" of sic[edit]
  Occasionally a writer places [sic] after his or her own words, to indicate that 
  the language has been chosen deliberately for special effect, especially where 
  the writer's ironic meaning may otherwise be unclear.[18] Bryan A. Garner dubbed 
  this use of sic "ironic", providing the following example from Fred Rodell's 1955 
  book Nine Men:[2]

  [I]n 1951, it was the blessing bestowed on Judge Harold Medina's prosecution 
  [sic] of the eleven so-called 'top native Communists,' which blessing meant 
  giving the Smith Act the judicial nod of constitutionality.

I think "crappybird" is being ironic and making some sort of meta-comment about how Android may be free-as-in-beer, and somewhat free-as-in-speech, but it isn't really free because REASON GOES HERE.

I think the implication is that "free" is being quoted from elsewhere and the author doesn't necessarily agree that it is without cost just because such cost is not denominated in dollars.