> Mr. Brady, who remains Aqueti’s biggest shareholder, said he has no qualms about aiding China’s surveillance system, which critics claim leads to humans-rights abuses.
> “A government doesn’t need the hand of technology to be oppressive,” he said.
Such a stupid argument. So you have two factors: X and Y that contribute to bad thing Z. Decreasing X (surveillance technology in this case) will decrease Z, even if Y (oppressive-minded government) remains the same. But his statement is aimed to occlude that obvious fact through sophistry.
I don't really need to point out the other obvious place where the same argument often gets used.
> “A government doesn’t need the hand of technology to be oppressive,” he said.
I interpret that as meaning "They will do bad things with or without me". An interesting twist on the usual "I am not responsible for what my customers do with my product".
I often wish security cameras in the US were more powerful. They're terrible at identifying useful information from a crime in progress: license plates, face and clothing... the important bits are always blurry.
Very good cameras are available in the US, people are bad at placement and choosing appropriate cameras. They install cameras too high up to capture faces and choose cameras with extremely wide views. If you concentrate your pixels on a smaller area you are more likely to get a useful image.
A quick test is to have a friend put on a hoodie and creep around your house at different times of day. How many clear shots of their face do you get? Or are you just capturing the top of their head? In my experience if you don't have a face or a license plate the police aren't interested.
Usually at parking spots outside businesses. Or parking areas in general - another friend's catalytic converter got stolen because he drives an SUV and the ground clearance allows for very easy cutting.
In both cases, the camera footage was utterly useless.
Well, even when they're switched on and the police have somehow managed to not delete the incriminating footage before it gets turned over there's still very little difference. The sad fact is that police are above the law.
The worst mass deaths under Chinese Communism occurred during the huge famine of 1959-1961. About 50 million people died who shouldn’t have died. Mass numbers of anything are hard to wrap our minds around, but essentially this was the Holocaust times 4.
I wish I could say Justice would be dispensed to the Western collaborators of totalitarian regimes, but both the Koch’s and IBM sold extensively to the Nazi’s, and only grew richer later.
It's Holocaust times 10: 4,5 million of Jews were died (6 millions if children are counted, children are not counted back then). But you may want to compare Chinese Famine with Holodomor: 7 millions of Ukrainians are killed using hunger by Stalin communists in USSR (30 millions if children are counted), so Chinese Famine is 6x larger.
> “A government doesn’t need the hand of technology to be oppressive,” he said.