In totalitarian 1984 China, government surveillance is so pervasive that even private companies that have no law enforcement function will send surveillance data to the state.
It’s pretty funny how people in the west worry about surveillance China while same and worse is happening at home. Western media constantly running negative stories about China is a really insidious propaganda tactic because the implication behind these stories is that this sort of thing couldn’t happen in the west. In effect what they’re saying is look at how scary China is, aren’t you lucky that you live in a free and democratic western society.
You would be suprised how many people are actively fighting against it in the west. Autonomous vehicles vs civilians is a huge topic in San Francisco, which is the key difference between the two countries. One accepted it, the other is actively fighting against it.
What we see in the west is what’s generally known as controlled opposition. There is a bit of preformative dissent allowed to make people feel like they have a say in these things. The reality is that if you’re think you’re fighting it, then you’re way too late to the party. Everybody has a phone that tracks them everywhere, plenty of people now have devices like Alexa that record all their conversations. All this data goes to corporate servers, and then straight to NSA and anybody else willing to pay for it. The west is one of the most surveilled societies in human history, but people living in the west don’t even realize it.
The type of surveillance and who its going to is not necessarily the same body, and both corpo and government are not always on the same side on the issue. Which is why its such a gray area, at least in the states.
For instance, although San Francisco approved of the Waymo/Cruise usage in the city, it also was one of the leading figures that blamed Cruise for its ”interruption" that killed a homeless guy who was not hit by a cruise vehicle. But a bus, which they blamed cruise for interrupting the hospital van.
Its also hard to compare China and the U.S due to how the governments are structured. Yes, its fairly common knowlege that the NSA has backdoors in a lot of things, its still fundamentally a Federal branch which has its powers restricted on what it can do due to States rights being significantly larger, vs a more centralized government who can act almost immediately on some action.
Take example for something fairly basic, weed. Even if weed was federally illegal, the states rights usually matter more unless youre specifically on federally owned institution (e.g a military base)
The federal government in US literally has the power to disappear US citizens and ship them off to places like gitmo without any process. Not sure how anybody can pretend their powers are somehow limited. Something basic like weed does not threaten the regime, take something basic like reporting war crimes and see how long before you’re disappeared and tortured.
So would you claim that Justin Stoner for instance is currently deported or in jail for whistleblowing against the Maywand district murders?
Not implying that it doesnt happen, but youre believing that they have more power than they actually do, a governemnt thats already approaching its next shutdown because it routinely doesnt get stuff done.
here’s what I claim https://theintercept.com/2019/06/21/guantanamo-bay-indefinite-detention/
