Obviously in a perfect world none of the "bad" things happen, but I'd rather take the US government spying on me than the Chinese government spy on me.
The US on the other hand has replaced a bunch of democratically-elected governments in South America with dictatorships, taught torture classes to the people who tortured my grandfather in Brazil, and has taken the economical blockade of Venezuela over the course of decades to the current level of a humanitarian crisis and a disintegrated state, to which (surprise!) they'll have to "bring democracy".
> I don't like the false equivalence of what the US-lead western intelligence does and what the Chinese state does.
I agree, it's a false equivalence. The effects of US-lead western intelligence actions are objectively more perverse.
But it's a point that will continue to be made as long as the US diplomats continue to use Cold War cliches to describe the "enemy" while back-patting the US as a global sentinel for liberal values and human rights.
The USSR couldn't have dreamed of the kind of mass surveillance apparatus the US has.
Not everyone shares your opinion.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/chin...
Me, just like Uyghurs, would prefer to be spied on by the evil empire which DOESN'T rule me.
Uyghurs are ruled by China so they'd rather be spied on by us for sure.
I live in Europe so I'm ruled by US, and therefore would prefer China to spy on me.
This line of argument is all about moral blame, and not related to practical outcome. Correctly morally blaming the US for its practices won't protect you from Chinese malfeasance.
> It is clearly a double standard. But the answer is to hold the US to account. Not bring more of this hostile crap in.
I mean, I think it's the nature of things like this that they are justifiable but not pleasant to suffer from. This is weaponry, not poetry; if theirs is better we suffer, that's it.
It's akin to economic dependence. The thought of Europe depending on Russia (or the USA) for energy/electricity is unfathomable, yet we allow the US in particular to be the "holder" of an enormous part of our economy. IT is literally used by every industry and in some cases is very central to it. (IE; power stations make heavy use of automation and computers with CPU's and Operating Systems living at the very heart of that.)
It's troubling that we don't do more to offset this, especially if you're right, and holding this industry is a weapon of sorts.
However there is no strong dependence: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/07/19/how-depe...
tl;dr: 23% of German power comes from gas; that 35% of that gas comes from Russia. That's a power dependency of roughly 8%.
Personally I don't think that's the same as being held entirely captive by a monopoly country as is the case when it comes to IT.
But, it's a fair point, I'll take it. Replacing 8% of a countries energy input would be difficult, but I would argue that it's not impossible.
> However there is no strong dependence: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/07/19/how-depe....
> tl;dr: 23% of German power comes from gas; that 35% of that gas comes from Russia. That's a power dependency of roughly 8%.
> Personally I don't think that's the same as being held entirely captive by a monopoly country as is the case when it comes to IT.
> But, it's a fair point, I'll take it.
Dependence used to be worse, this is result of efforts to lower it because Russia was using it as a blackmail tool.
But I'm just nitpicking anyway, it's not the actual topic.
Maybe not, but it's a very good point.
We used to have a reliance on Russia but due to poor behaviour we took steps to remove their power.
I believe we should do that again with technology in regards to the USA.
The difference of course is that we implicitly trust US tech companies, of course we do, nobody else has such a monopoly on CPUs and Operating System production. Not to mention web browsers and all kinds of technology. Avoiding the USA in your tech stack is quite literally impossible.
And we permit the US government (by extension the NSA and 5eyes) to do what ever they want to us without fear of repercussion because what course of action could we take? As long as we are not a US citizen we have literally zero protections.
it’s to the point that my EU based company is applying US sanctions (to Crimea for instance, where no EU sanction covers telecommunications) because we would fall out of line in many of our contracts from US tech companies.
It is clearly a double standard. But the answer is to hold the US to account. Not bring more of this hostile crap in.