Comment by JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#...
> Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?
The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
You can't make extraordinary claims like that without providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has this to say:
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
You don't really have to imagine this.
Kommersant is a way better source than the Russian government anyway.
As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese citizen could feel the same.
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
> it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.