If I'm developing some kind on tech, both have been caught using their state agencies to do industrial spying; if I'm active in some push for some non-mainstream activism (like, abolishing copyrights), both have done out of jurisdiction enforcement of their policies, and there isn't much difference on means either.
Personally, I'd imagine China spying on me is a smaller risk than the US, since my country is more under political influence of the US. But whatever you do, you will have to protect or subject yourself to government spying, thus there isn't any big difference.
That seems like an absolutely absurd comparison. The US government is elected, if enough of the population cared about the issue (and who knows, as it gets worse, they might) the government can be held accountable at the ballot box. The same is in no way true in China.
Going with the copyright theme: most American voters would have been happy with the copyright provisions of the trans-atlantic treaty since that increased "shareholder value" that would benefit their 401k's.
Even aside from that, China is actively exporting their political and economic model all over the world. They are using economic investments and financial grants to companies, institutions and cultural organisations as leverage to stifle criticism, and silence factual reporting of events in China all over the world, and almost certainly in your own country too.
Luckily, it has now expired and was not renewed. Some reading on this very controversial section:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/fact-sheet-section-215-usa-pat...
As if the three-letter agencies never tried to cripple encryption before September 11th, 2001...
https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf
Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too.
So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.
"An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. "
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intellige...
You do know they have the worst dirt on everyone right?
step1. public pressures on the electorate
step2. electorate pressures on spying agencies
... and step1 is impossible in China
I will add more:
- where is the pressure to close Guantanamo?
- where is the pressure to como clean with the lies leading to the Irak war?
There is a lot of it. However, it's countered by the pressure of, "Where do we send those people? My constituents don't want them in our district."
Wow, that Brexit is really taking a toll on your collective psyche, isn't it? :)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/isbritaineuropea...
Does the UK do mass-surveillance of it's own and foreign citizens, on UK soil and outside ? Yes [1]
Strong encryption of private communications is NOT legal in the UK. You have to give the police access when they request it and you cannot use the rights you have in the US to avoid giving this access [2]. (unless you consider strong encryption stuff where you have to make all keys available to the police, border guard, gchq, foreign intelligence services, and others still strong encryption. I don't)
The other huge difference is that the UK refuses to be accountable for their mass surveillance afterwards. In the US a big demand is that there is a paper trail for spying, to the person being spied upon. Granted, this may be buried in something like a phone contract for mass-targeting. When they target you specifically, however, you will be notified (afterwards, if the judge so decides, but can even be beforehand), and failure to do this makes the spying illegal. Furthermore, this gives private individuals and companies the option to sue to have the police/FBI/NSA/DEA/... explain themselves (and more generally the US state).
In the UK however:
1) No notification is given to the person being spied upon. The state just does it.
2) There is no recourse. If you were spied upon because a police officer wanted to be your boyfriend and needed to know where your actual boyfried was to beat him up, that's legal. [3] (yes, I realize these guys got fired, however, their actions were ruled legal)
3) If anyone in the UK takes the side of the person being spied upon, whether an internet provider, an application provider (ie. outlook.com/fb/gmail/...), they will be vigorously pursued and punished for that. This is highly illegal.
4) The UK has cooperation treaties (ie. EU treaties, and others) that let police officers in ~70 countries spy on British citizens (I heard that these treaties were used to install a phone tap, yes really, on Angela Merkel's phone. Yes, that Angela Merkel. The utter incompetence is baffling in it's scope. And yes, the guy (an officer) did this as a joke and got fired for it)
So to say I don't understand your criticism here massively understates the situation ... Obviously, as a UK citizen you've got some more local problems to sort out before you criticize the US.
In reality, the UK/EU is pushing these news articles and blowing up cooperation for EXACTLY the opposite reason : they don't want increased privacy for people, they want to further reduce it. They want the US to honor spying requests without respecting US law. They don't want Facebook to ask "can you explain why this is really necessary" when a police officer is asking for the exact location of EU citizens. They don't want to give reasons, and they certainly don't want the person to be told afterwards (and potentially sue them). They want full FB and instagram chat logs in every divorce case. They want ever single email a person ever sent in every commercial dispute. They want every police force and secret service in Europe to have access to every Europeans every mail, immediately, with zero oversight or tracking, and especially without any paper trail available to their victims. THAT's what Europe is fighting for.
THAT's what they're calling "US surveillance overreach".
Well, that, and the fact that the US successfully recorded some rather high level conversations between Merkel and Macron and managed to get caught doing it. In other words, they're incompetent, and angry. And of course, that's the US's fault (despite, of course, that Germany was also caught attempting to bug Obama, and caught having successfully bugged several high level officials before getting caught). And of course, they're angry for Trump getting elected (if you don't believe me, watch this [4], and listen to the questions).
That's why there is this campaign of "the US is horrible on privacy". There is "no cooperation". But, sadly, the US is the champion of privacy in this particular fight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to-gi...
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police-of...
I say that as someone with a UK passport.
I wonder why this is being downvoted so badly.
But the UK really stands out within the EU.
In isolation you're right. To expand it: "If you want to host an anti-{russia,putin,trump,jew,white,black,asian,democracy,kim} 'news' website" (as in against all or some of those) then the US would be the place to do it.
IOW: Good luck with anti-Putin in Russia or Nazi in Germany. The US is your best bet. The US didn't raid news papers forcing journalists to drill holes through their hard drives. The UK did.
> I'm a fan of free speech, but am generally against Nazis as a concept. We fought a war over this :)
We didn't fight a war over someone's right to be a Nazi. They really did start it. And the US didn't really join until it was actually attacked, if you're American. They also didn't fight a war about someone's right to be Japanese (or even their right to believe in the divinity of their emperor).
Chamberlain even thought Nazis could be part of the "peace for our time".
Please.
(and doxxing is not about expressing your thoughts and ideas)
Where on earth did I say that? You cannot deny, however, that it is far more prevalent.
And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.
> I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.
Harassment: Existed.
Doxxing: Off topic. Not thoughts and opinions. (Voltaire said "disagree". You don't agree or disagree about someone's home address or real name)
Social media: We live in a more connected world. In a less connected world the same effects would be had in your local community.
> And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.
Straw man. Also publishing other people's copyrighted works is not censorship.
You're changing the topic. doxxing (which you have now brought up TWICE) has nothing to do with it.
China routinely imprisons political subversives. It has among the lowest rates of voluntary organ donors in the world, yet it has one of the largest rates of organ transplants. Those organs come from prisoners, many of them political prisoners. They’re using that surveillance system to identify and incarcerate these people right now.
But hey. The NSA has files on people too so who cares? How many people, have been broken up for spare parts by the NSA or due to overreaching US and British Intelligence? In China it’s probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands. This isn’t ‘very concerning’. It’s horrifying.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood your point. In my post I did specifically call out British involvement in mass surveillance right alongside the US. Or maybe you think I should have called it out more? I’m a bit confused.
And the US and UK, the Netherlands, France and I believe Italy have all been caught protecting police officers that used surveillance powers for that purpose I alluded to (finding boyfriends of a girl a police officer likes and beating them up). Given that list, I feel like we can safely assume that all EU states in fact de-facto allow and protect police officers doing this. Likewise police officers have been caught sporadically using official "legal intercept" tools to "help" in divorce, finding children they abused, finding ex-lovers they had a quarrel with, and the like.
Note: I don't mean just that police officers did that, that's troubling enough by itself that those tools allow that. My main complaint is that the justice system protected those police officers from the consequences of those actions.
The only case where the police seems to find this behavior by their own officers unacceptable is when it's directly used to help a (non-police-officer) criminal. And this is very widespread behavior. It happens in the US (but of course, in the US the victims (eventually) get notified that an officer did that, so you can sue them), it happens in the EU, and in the EU it's completely unchecked and unchallengeable, and "surprisingly" this does not lead to them using it more responsibly.
I find things just baffling. FB/Google/MS/... are all begin vigorously pursued for essentially selling your contact list ... by people who used violence against ISPs/ASPs (like FB/Google/MS/... but not just them) to allow police officers to beat up love rivals and abuse children. And when they got caught doing that ... they immediately rallied behind the criminals (because yes, what those officers did was in fact criminal in almost all cases).
I feel like we've got much bigger problems here than Trump's campaign using contact lists from phones/FB to get more people to vote for him. And I feel like the EU should not be criticizing anyone for being weak on privacy.
Caveat, I'm a European (well a Brit, so almost European) and I'm appalled by US and yes British violations of privacy and surveillance overreach. Things like the threats to cripple or ban private use of strong encryption are appallingly damaging and misguided.
However nations with an elected government accountable to the people doing this stuff is one thing. We still have the right and mechanisms to protest and these protests have frequently made a real difference. strong encryption of private communications is till legal and threats to it have gone nowhere. The fact that governments from multiple political groups, in multiple countries have looked at this and decided that the benefits to their electorate outweigh the dangers offers at least some comfort. It's at least possible that they are right, although I would prefer much stronger checks and balances.
Pervasive active harvesting, analysis, intervention, censorship and subsequent punishments of 'private' communication by a totalitarian state, with the open goal of enforcing ideological obedience is not the same thing, and it's not ok. At all.