There are almost 200,000 of these incidents every year. Several of them grow into large demonstrations with barricades, sit-ins, and rioting. They are usually reactions against come companies, local government, land seizures, or some corrupt individuals.
As long as people don't demand changing of the system, government often gives in at least a little. People can be changed, more investigations, some government actions can be cancelled.
It's clever way to bend without breaking. Allow people to show their frustration against things that are wrong but control tightly what kind of targets are allowed.
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.
If it weren't for Snowden many of us who had been ranting about the NSA would still be getting dismissed with off-hand remarks of "conspiracy theorist" with a condescending undertone. Yet even as those of us warning about these issues move on to tell people about the next thing, we get the same thing. Even worse, after being proved right by Wikileaks or Snowden etc, those same people are still making excuses for their failure to heed those warnings. For example, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to start talking about NSA and to get "yeah we'll, we knew about echelon, it wasn't a surprise" type comments. Yes, those of us paying attention knew, but the problem is that we all got dismissed by smugly idiotic people with phrases like "crackpot conspiracy theorist"...
They just don't happen in the same scale and they don't have as bad consequences for people.
> "Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument.
To "that's a conspiracy theory" it actually is, and though I still agree that it's a red herring to talk about the US when China is brought up (and China or Russia or human nature when the US is brought up), it's not a "conspiracy theory" at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
> It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.
> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
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.
Have you tried? Did you know that the United States communist party has been in existence for a century? [0]
> (says, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) - this will get you on terrorist watchlists
I'm not aware PETA is on terrorist watchlist.
Sure the engineers can make the system lie. And they probably will to some extent. But it's a much smaller number of people you need to keep pleased and policed.
You might enjoy reading The Dictator’s Handbook.
It's same there, a few of them are financially rewarded for pushing privacy evanding tactics and others silently follow otherwise risk being reported.
Facebook completely kneecapped the ability of the Rohingya to organize and tell their story by pulling stuff like this at the request of the Burmese government. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-...
EDIT: This whole idea that Facebook's only sin was not moderating enough, and that they didn't give direct support to the government to help the genocide is just their PR and legal departments going into overdrive because they know they screwed up hard.
- At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor.
- At the city level they have more ways to collect information about people like companies feeding data bases, people interacting with the internet and retail.
He explained that the idea is even if 10% of the population is brain washed they can keep tabs on the 90% and when shit hits the fan they want to be in the know. After Tiananmen they have followed a formula: Keep enough people happy and conforming with economic prosperity and get ahead of the curb for restive remainder.