As Snowden revealed, the NSA itself is way above that playing field. They (quite unsurprisingly) use IPs in the respective country, or just false-flag IPs in "enemy" countries. And the data is not actually sent as plain packets but tacked in the form of metadata onto normal, innocent packets going elsewhere. Then servers on intermediate hops exfiltrate that data. And none of it might happen if you're not actually targeted.

That of course underlines your main point. I don't see "sends nothing to foreign IPs" as an argument though.

That said, I also think it's incredibly naive to think that a collection system wouldn't make use of a local proxy to mask the ultimate destination of the information. It's such a trivial task to do, and provides a host of benefits to obfuscate and sow doubt as to where the data is going and will be ultimately used for.

I'm not assuming that "it must be reporting back to China through a proxy!", but rather, the absence of certain national IPs in that list shouldn't be used to rule out scenarios either. An idea scenario for me would be that the device didn't call back period, or if it did, it did so to endpoints that could be authenticated and audited.

I despise the chinese government - may it concern Uighurs or the treatment of Tibetans. Still I have a hard time believing none of my data collected by google is used by the US administration, which, as we know, is not always lead by a trustful person. Still, if I had to choose whom to embargo, I'd definitely choose china/russia.

Since it's so easy to cheat traffic, there are two options: only china/russia needs to cover traffic, or ...?

To some of us there is not much difference.