Comment by abduhl

If you're part of one of the subgroups that the American government has historically mistreated then it absolutely makes sense to be more afraid of your own government.

> 1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens; 2) the Chinese government has

And before someone hops in with Kent State, Tuskegee trials, et al., let's set the comparison bar at order-of x00,000 to x0,000,000 citizens killed by the government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_to...

>A good thought experiment is whether you think the people of Crimea or Donetsk would prefer having the Ukrainian government spy on them instead of the Russian government and whether this preference changed in 2014 or 2022.

we're not in that situation, but i would expect the people of crimea and donetsk would prefer that nobody surveilled them.

but in a practical sense, surveilliance of people in donetsk and crimea by china would be less immediately threatening to their life, because china is not conducting military action in those places.

>1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

i don't understand how anyone can seriously make this claim, and i really don't understand why potential danger isn't a consideration.

potential danger is simply danger. privacy rights are established in recognition that a threat is itself harmful.

and abuse is not unreal. america has had a larger incarcerated population than any other country for my entire lifetime. both absolute size and per capita.

in america, political movements are consistently dismantled by counterintelligence. political action is met with violence and arrest.

perhaps few people are outright murdered, but it's not necessary to murder the powerless. outside of america proper, american power is much more lethal.

every concern and contradiction that threatens the present situation - environment, infrastructure, housing, healthcare, labor, war - is maintained by suppression of political organizing, enabled by surveillance.

the administration incoming next week has promised a massive project of deportation. it has promised retaliation against journalists. it is apparently motivated to criminalize the existence of transgender people. none of these threats are reduced by american surveillance of american people.

>2) the Chinese government has [abused its power]

sure. but this is a problem primarily for chinese people, and americans are not subjects of chinese power.

american surveillance of american people does not reduce any threat of chinese power.

why isn't the american legislature addressing the problems of american people subject to american power?

>3) the US and China are going to war one day.

i don't expect this. there's too much to lose on both sides. it would be a disaster and a tragedy.

true or not, it's certain that american citizens would benefit, and america itself would improve, if arbitrary surveillance on the present scale was impossible.

> the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).