There was a huge backlash against the government after Snowden. And Snowden was an American who leaked classified government information for the good of the country. Our perception of Snowden is generally very positive. If what you are saying is right, this wouldn't be the case. You don't see many Chinese whistleblowers leaking the most classified information to the vast public, for example.

The patriot act was passed after 9/11 where the people were hurt and scared. There is backlast against the Patriot act too. Besides PRISM was a highly classified program because the people wouldn't be okay with that type of surveillance here in the U.S where the expectation of privacy isn't even a thing in China.

They are two totally different worlds.

yes but where does Snowden now live?

You can't deny the hypocrisy here. While our citizens might support him they don't to the extent that they can pressure governments enough to allow him to return home.

Pressuring the government into action is hard and requires personal sacrifice. It would be amazing if we had the same vigor and care about our personal liberties as for instance the people of Hong Kong.

exactly. But if we really held civil liberties as a value we felt strongly about we'd do that, so we do a bit but not that much. :(

It’s not really hypocrisy if the people who are pro-Snowden are also anti-China. Citizens with opinions aren’t hypocrites because their current government’s policies have flaws.

Oh no, Snowden. I guess then all other world powers are equally as shitty as the US.

Search "false equivalence". Use Baidu. Or Yandex.

Yes, but I think the difference is that CCP is much further down the abuse road than Western governments.

First, they've had neighbor surveilling (snitching on) neighbor to control the people since Mao: it's part of the culture and fully accepted because they can't envision another way. They have a saying [ref needed] "Such a people deserve such a government." Now of course the whole tech stack supports it. We're just getting used to ubiquitous domestic surveillance in the West.

Second, because they've further along, they've used their control of information to abuse their power. Tibet, Tiananmen, organ harvesting, and more lately the Uighur atrocities against people of dissent or race. The West is not there but you can see we're blasting down that road now.

It seems you can't mention ^ those keywords without the sensitivity brigade downvoting you.

> Things like National Security letters and the PATRIOT act make the US to me, as a European, seem very hypocritical right now.

These are not even remotely comparable. China is an outright police state. Not saying the United States doesn't have a lot of work to do with regards to personal liberty, but the Government here has nothing close to the iron grip control that the CCP has; they may want it, and what Government doesn't, but they don't have it and a ton of our internal legal mechanisms are designed specifically to prevent it.

Indeed. False equivalence is the oxygen of these discussions.

We should be able to discuss America's governance failures and problem areas without conflating them with horribly regressive models of governance.