The irony with all of this is that if you live in a country allied with the US, you are safer on Tiktok than any US-bases social media platform. If you live in a western country, the US has way more power to fuck over your life than China does. It only takes one email from a three letter agency and your life is completely ruined. China on the other hand has no power over you if you are a westerner without family living in china. The only power china has is in Asia, you can be as rude as you want toward them if you don't have close family living there. They know better than to start fire bombing Europe or the US over whatever you have in you chat history.
Using social engineering to fuck with your life is also much harder and more expensive when their hardcore supporters don't even speak the same language you do and they don't have support from the authorities to force you to do anything. They can't threaten to arrest you the same way an agent working for the US could.
The US on the other hand will get to you regardless of where you are in the world. They will go as far as killing state leaders and journalists overseas. Even as a US citizen living in the US, they literally passed laws under Obama that allows the US government to drone strike US citizens for national security reasons without a trial.
> Even as a US citizen living in the US, they literally passed laws under Obama that allows the US government to drone strike US citizen for national security reasons without a trial.
I honestly have no idea how Obama's reputation survived this. Taking executive action that completely undermines an individual's constitutional rights is monstrous. It's really sad that it was a total non-issue.
Also, what law you are referring to? I believe at the time there was no legal precedent whatsoever. I'm not sure of anything that passed afterwards either.
Obama's reputation did suffer, although it probably improved among the right. It wasn't a "total non-issue," it was extremely controversial at the time.
Although, the US being what it is, more people probably celebrated than held a strong opinion either way.
> I honestly have no idea how Obama's reputation survived this. Taking executive action that completely undermines an individual's constitutional rights is monstrous. It's really sad that it was a total non-issue.
I'm "conservative" (although I abhor Trump) but I will say in defense of Obama that there clearly are exceptions from constitutional rights. For example, police are clearly allowed to use lethal force to stop an armed and dangerous person.
I cannot speak on the finer parts of US law, but it seems obvious to me that it isn't as clear cut at some people portray it.
> For example, police are clearly allowed to use lethal force to stop an armed and dangerous person.
But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for. They defined a US citizen as a target and drone striked him when they were able.
> But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for.
It's worse than that, Anwar Al-Awlaki never had a warrant for his arrest, he was never charged with any crimes. In fact, after finding out about the "Disposition Matrix" (read: Kill List) that his son was on, Al-Awlaki's father publicly pleaded with the Obama Administration to actually charge his son with a crime so that he could be afforded Due Process. The Obama Administration refused to charge him with a crime, instead they just took him out a few months later with a targeted drone strike.
They essentially said they didn't want to have to explain things in court, so killing him was easier. Despite his scary name, Anwar Al-Awlaki was an American kid born in New Mexico. He may have been a bad guy, but we'll never know because the government decided it didn't need to prove it in court.
> But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for.
Disclaimers:
- I am no specialist on US constitution or laws but generally,
- I don't know this case kn particular except from what I have read from media, especially sites like HN
With that out of the way, from a common sense perspective, stalking and sniping a criminal who is a persistent threat to the public cannot possibly be unquestionably wrong, can it?
I mean, lets just go all out in a thought experiment that goes to the extreme end to prove my point: an American citizen sits in a known location and we know he is about to press the trigger that will release a highly contagious deadly pathogen inside 10 large cities, including at least one in US.
A police sniper has a steady aim on him from 100m and through a bug at the scene he hears him say: "this broadcast is coming to an end, I'll now press the button".
Will it not be correct for the police sniper to fire?
If it is, then the only question left is if it was legal for him to do it according to American law or not, and not something that should be an unrecoverable stain on someone's history.
It would depend on what that officer knew to be his 'rules of engagement', but also he a police officer and so it would be legal. They murder people regularly for far less reason than this without legal consequences. And, because of qualified immunity, even when what they do crosses into illegality, they still face no consequences. The POTUS need not be involved, police can and do violate constitutional rights all on their own.
I'm more confused at how Biden became president after that, and how most of the cabinet from the Obama era is now Bidens cabinet. At least in all the warmongering positions. He was after all the instrument of the Iraq war before Bush. At this point I have to wonder if Biden has Obama's warmonger cabinet, or if Obama was actually trying to do the things he promised and couldn't because Biden placed all those warmongers there(I'm talking about, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, Kirby, Austin etc. leaving one person specifically out in fear of the HN crowd).
> most of the cabinet from the Obama era is now Bidens cabinet
In case anyone is curious, there is exactly one person in Biden's cabinet (16 people total) that previously served in Obama's cabinet: the Secretary of Agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vilsack
If you further consider "cabinet-level" positions (25 people total), two more people are included: the current Secretary of Veterans Affairs was previously the White House chief of staff and the current White House chief of staff was previously the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_McDonoughhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Zients
Of the 5 people mentioned by name in the parent comment, 3 have never been in the Cabinet and none were in both Obama's and Biden's Cabinets.
My best guess for the unnamed person is the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (previously a cabinet-level position!) and who was Acting Secretary of State under Obama? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Burns_(diplomat)
> I'm more confused at how Biden became president after that
> He was after all the instrument of the Iraq war before Bush
You'll be less confused when you understand that the American electorate generally has no issues with invading other countries.
And even when it does have an issue with it, it holds its nose, and votes anyways. Both parties are generally ran by people who have similar opinions on this question.
I mean not to be callous towards the Ukrainians (who are incredibly heroic), but:
- NATO is a stronger alliance, so the US will not have to spend as much defending Europe in the long run
- us has spent ~1-2k/citizen to dismantle one of its biggest existential threats
- china has tons of egg on face
If nukes don't happen, I'll be entertaining the idea Biden the greatest stable genius Chad president we've had. And I started out disliking Biden. Definitely hated him when he was veep.
Even from the pure realpolitik perspective, I don’t understand how the cold warriors came to the conclusion that massive destabilization of a nuclear superpower was a desirable outcome.
Didn’t we learn our lesson from humiliating post-Soviet Russia in the 90s? (Or Versailles-ing Germany?) Economic desperation yields aggressive strongmen and violent populations.
Appeasing dictators is not a winning move. Trump sucking Putin's dick dry did not work after all. (Well it did wonders for old Vladimir.)
And Ukrainians want to (and wanted to) fight. It's not like US psyops campaigns made them. Since 2014 they spent a lot of resources on fortifications, training, arms manufacture, etc.
Characterizing diplomatic conversation as a sex act is not exactly a winning move either.
Ukrainians are welcome to fight if they want to, but you are seriously misinformed if you believe they have mounted even a small fraction of their firepower, training, analysis, and logistics without the aid of the US and other NATO countries. Ukraine never had a remote chance to resist the Russian army, and they are now paying a terrible price for allowing themselves to become the lackeys of the US and NATO.
The Biden administration is responsible for elevating the Ukrainians into this role as an extension of the US onto the direct border with Russia. Russia will never tolerate it no matter what it takes, and we all know what that entails. The US would do no differently if Russia did the same on its border, which makes the Biden administration’s actions hypocritical as well.
Americans are welcome to fight if they want to, but you are seriously misinformed if you believe they have mounted even a small fraction of their firepower, training, analysis, and logistics without the aid of the France and Spain. America never had a remote chance to resist the British army and navy, and they are now paying a terrible price for allowing themselves to become the lackeys of France and Spain.
Substitute Britain/free France/exiled poland/Nazi Germany too if you like.
Biden's predecessor launched more drone strikes than Obama, and shit-talked world leaders on Twitter to a frightening degree. Remember when "war with Iran" became a Twitter meme for a solid week because Trump drone-striked an Iranian commander?
None of these people are actually peacemakers. Not Biden, not Obama, none of them. All of them support American imperialism and hegemony.
> Even as a US citizen, they literally passed laws under Obama that allows the US government to drone strike US citizen for national security reasons without a trial.
are you referring to [Anwar al-Awlaki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki)? i was under the impression there just wasn’t a ruling on it. which, pretty shitty to let the right to due process degrade de-facto, but not quite the same as “literally passing laws” that make it unambiguously legal.
Well it makes it worse. The constitution is very clear about affording citizens due process. Obama setting the precedent of drone striking the US citizen without consequences is what muddies the waters.
> If you live in a western country, the US has way more power to fuck over your life than China does.
I got news for you, they're able to get to you too. Likely with less preparation then the USA would need if you're only living in a US aligned country.
Telling them to fuck off did not work with Gui Minhai, who was a Swedish citizen at the time. If you're in some way Chinese they can just do the dragging first and make you say the "I wanted to come home" line later.
The reports mentioned that multiple people vanished after getting dragged into their offices, even with video evidence. That makes your point kinda moot in my opinion.
What I find extremely odd is how the US is pushing for the ICC to arrest Putin. [1] Aren't they opening pandoras box here as they are also not a signatory of the ICC and have quite a few very similar skeletons in the closet? I know there is the "Invade the Haag" Act[2] but Lavrov also just said they would drop a bomb on the Haag if Putin gets arrested.
How exactly does the ICC enforce these decrees? Fly into Moscow and snatch Putin from his office? Fly into Texas and snatch George Bush from his art studio?
They would be arrested upon setting foot in a country that is part of the ICC. Similar to how interpol issues arrest warrants. However, since these are high ranking officials that will just not travel to these destinations it's a pointless exercise. It does however hinder these people from going on speaking tour after they have left office which many do.
How exactly this would play out if a country tries to arrest a head of state which travels with security is unclear. I highly doubt any leader or nation would attempt to travel to a country where there is that risk of such a confrontation.
This article is heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. What, specifically, in the RESTRICT/DATA acts is doing surveillance or censorship things?
I don't doubt that this is the case, I just want to know the actual contours of the law. This article had three linked Tweets, one of which is a political opinion, one of which is a video, and the last is a screenshot from the "In General" section of the bill. The "In General" section is not the actual law itself, it just describes what the law is intended to do.
The thread that the third tweet is a part of provides more information, but it's still very hard to follow. For example, one of the tweets claims:
> If you recall from before, “Foreign Individuals” can now also be US citizens that are deemed a national security threat. Once designated, the bill grants authority to enforce any action deemed necessary to mitigate the threat, with no due process and few limits on punishments.
This is very fucking scary! However, the associated images do not include anything that says US citizens. The only thing that would apply would be if a US citizen conspired with a designated foreign asset to violate... whatever is in this bill.
You need to present your information better, rather than just saying that something is bad and then handing a bunch of algebra to the reader to figure out.
This is absolutely the most craven anti-people hood power grab my generation has seen in America. Absolutely as bad as the Patriot Act. Truly wretched way to take fear mongering & use it to intrude absolutely on anything the military or the government does not like. Fuck this, fuck these people.
The excerpts in that thread do not back up the central claim they make in the first tweet, which is that
> It gives the government authority over all forms of communication domestic or abroad
I personally don't think this TikTok panic is justified.
The bill grants the executive the authority to designate entites under the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary (like China) as threats to national security and to prohibit transactions with those entities. That seems bad enough; it should be discussed in terms of what it does, and not along sensationalist lines.
On the one hand, using fear to justify colossal incursions by the government into every possible concern has absolutely no place in my heart & I spit at the premise. Fear doesn't justify making an awful bill. Fear didn't justify rescinding American rights broadly for the Patriot Act. Even after that horrible day. It was shit then, it's worse pandering pathetic fear-shit now.
But. I agree:
> it should be discussed in terms of what it does, and not along sensationalist lines.
Both myself and the link I've provided have been remarkably sensationalist, yes. But there's also so many massive escape hatches that give this proposal unlimited blanket power, again and again and again. The start itself is auspiciously broad.
> The Secretary ... is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate, including by negotiating, entering into, or imposing, and enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States that the Secretary determines
Off to a brilliantly open start, to pursue not just any potential threat from anyone at all associated with foreigners, but to pursue anything that is in any way even risky.
If something "otherwise poses [ed: under not already listed vague dangers] an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons", and the Secretary of Commerce "determine[s] ... if such transaction poses an undue or unacceptable risk" and if found to be an unnacceptable risk can then determine "any other action [that] should be taken to mitigate the effects of the covered transaction".
The Secretary of Commerce has to consult with some other heads of government, but then seemingly can say anything is a risk and determine any course of action on their own in response. Sensationalism ahoy but: the Secretary of Commerce just became the 5th branch of government, nice job everyone. Within the first 438 words of law-making we've created a brand new power to do anything against any threat (so long as it has any link or relationship whatsoever to foreigners aka "covered transactions").
Again, this is all the first law-making section (after S1 Short Title, S2 Definitions), "S3. Addressing Information and Communication Technology Products and Services that Pose Undue or Unacceptable Risk." Now, "S4. Addressing Information and Communication Technology Products and Services Holdings That Post Undue Or Unacceptable Risk", throws a little twist in. This time, the Secretary doesn't have any license to "any other action" they deem over any risk arising from a covered transaction. They instead make recommendations to the president over any covered holding that is of a foreign adversary or anyone who the Secretary says might be related, and who "poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons." The president can then do whatever they want: "the President may take such action as the President considers appropriate to compel divestment of, or otherwise mitigate the risk associated with, such covered holding to the full extent the covered holding is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States", with again "otherwise mitigate the risk" standing in as a "whatever the fuck we say" carte-blanche statement, as this Restrict act so continuously unlimitedly keeps handing out to everyone, with no checks in sight.
As for how this all goes down? "In carrying out the responsibilities under this Act, the Secretary may establish such rules, regulations, and procedures as the Secretary considers appropriate." So the Secretary can literally make new rules, regulations & procedures on the fly to do anything they want. Hello again 5th Branch.
How can the Secretary find stuff out? Oh they can now ask anyone anything anytime. "The Secretary may require any party to a transaction or holding under review or investigation pursuant to this Act to furnish under oath, in the form of reports or otherwise, at any time as may be required by the Secretary, complete information relative to any act, transaction, or holding, subject to the provisions of this Act."
There's a whole new class of crimes defined by this Act. There's a whole new "Specific Unlawful Acts" section, finding a variety of ways to make unlawful anything that stands in the way of this act or who does not fully participate or who does not turn over a requested piece of information or who in any way aids anyone who does anything to hinder this act. And in case we haven't built a "specific unlawful act" yet, there's the general unlawful act, "It shall be unlawful for a person to violate, attempt to violate, conspire to violate, or cause a violation of any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued under this Act" which just says anything slowing down the Secretary of Commerce in any way whatsoever is illegal, period.
The Secretary of Commerce has all the cards. Congress can deny adding a Foreign Adversary or removing one. But the Secretary is sole deteminer of who is acting in any way in concordance with a Foreign Adversary or potentially aiding their cause. There's seemingly no one else in the system here. We've created a super-powered position of unlimited enforcement capabilities, with near-infinite purview.
> but to pursue anything that is in any way even risky.
Specific kinds of risk, namely
> sabotage or subversion of . . . information and communications technology products and services in the United States; catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure; interfering in, or altering the result or reported result of a Federal election; coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary; an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons.
You might think it's overbroad (and I do actually), but it's not 'whatever the Secretary wants'.
> As for how this all goes down? "In carrying out the responsibilities under this Act, the Secretary may establish such rules, regulations, and procedures as the Secretary considers appropriate." So the Secretary can literally make new rules, regulations & procedures on the fly to do anything they want. Hello again 5th Branch.
This is a legal conception in administrative rule making, not carte blanche. This sort of language exists in lots of bills, and courts can and have struck down rules they believe go beyond the scope of a bill (see: WV v. EPA). The general scope of administrative rulemaking is also heavily restricted by the nondelegation doctrine (see DoT vs. AAR as a recent example).
> with again "otherwise mitigate the risk" standing in as a "whatever the fuck we say" carte-blanche statement, as this Restrict act so continuously unlimitedly keeps handing out to everyone, with no checks in sight.
This 'mitigation' passage is premised on a failure to compel divestment, which makes it pretty clear what is being referred to - efforts to limit access to something that has no US entity to go after. Again, not carte blanch, and courts can and have considered the intent behind legal provisions far less obvious than it is here.
> But the Secretary is sole deteminer of who is acting in any way in concordance with a Foreign Adversary or potentially aiding their cause.
I will just quote a law dictionary here
> in consultation means with the concurrence of the person with whom a delegating authority must consult before exercising a delegated or sub-delegated power
Consultation here does not mean what it means in colloquial conversation; the agreement of the relevant agency executives and the DNI are required.
Again, I actually think this is an impulsive and unnecessary law, but sensationalizing it and misinterpreting terms like 'mitigation' or 'consultation' doesn't help the case against it.
> You might think it's overbroad (and I do actually), but it's not 'whatever the Secretary wants'.
you list a bunch of the specific "poses an undue or unacceptable risk of—" claims &c &c. but we have tasked the Secretary of Commerce with hunting not just these risks down, but also 3.a.2, that which "otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons."
you've definitely given me/us a good greater perspective on a lot of legal langauge that isn't immediately clear to me. and genuinely thank you for that (although to be truthful i also kind of crave references on which to begin to interpret this for myself, but that is a huge ask & i generally trust/am thankful for your post). but there still feels like a lot of quite unguarded unlimited licenses here, where there's very few people in the loop.
you talk about consultation being a rather high commitment/bar than i've said, but it still unclear to me who determines who "the relevant executive department and agency heads" are. america has seen very dark times recently with political elements shopping selectively for receptive elements. i don't see what real restrictions there would be if the SoC asks two known-allies & they agree. how effectively do we expect other parties to be able to say, you ought have consulted me? even if consultation implies a need for concurrence: approval farming seems not-in-any-way-checked.
issues like mitigation just seem so dubious. because what if just to pick an example Signal comes under fire, for being a secure system that just so happens to be used by a Foreign Adversary? i don't see any real limits on what the SoC could ask, what they could compel, simply because a Foreign Adversary is somewhere involved. does RISC-V help our Foreign Adversaries? damned right it does, so what's to stop the SoC from pulling down every open architecture project on github? i still feel like there's no real checks here, that this is unlimited license. but i still thank you, and think you have potentially helped us escape misinterpretations.
Probably a good place to start are the SCOTUS cases I mentioned, as well as nondelegation doctrine (Kennedy's concurrence in Clinton v. NYC is a good resource there); looking into those should be helpful.
> but it still unclear to me who determines who "the relevant executive department and agency heads" are
This is usually delineated by executive order beforehand, so the President, effectively.
> how effectively do we expect other parties to be able to say, you ought have consulted me?
Well we have the Sec. of Commerce, the relevant agency heads, the DNI, the president, and, as a last resort, a concurrent resolution from Congress (which should only require simple majorities by the way, so a lower bar than the law itself) and the courts. Still a lot of power in the executive, so I get being concerned about that, but for me this is less about the individual of the Commerce secretary themselves.
> what's to stop the SoC from pulling down every open architecture project on github?
They have the power to prohibit transactions with labeled entities, so they could theoretically tell Github to stop hosting all open architecture projects by a specific Chinese company for example, but not all such projects in general.
> i still feel like there's no real checks here
As I mentioned, there are many checks, including Congress and the courts. The real concern is when they choose not to do their job, as was the case with the PATRIOT Act. That doesn't mean they don't exist; it means they were derelict in their duty. That's what I get concerned about - apathy in the structures that are supposed to guard against abuses.
Reading through the actual text of this bill (obligatory I am not a lawyer), I don't see _anything_ that actually would allow a Person ("a natural person, including a citizen or national of the United States or of any foreign country.") to be considered a "Covered Entity". The language for "Entity" _clearly_ specifies that it is only referring to artificial entities e.g. LLCs, Trusts, etc.
I have my own opinions on the bill, but I don't see a legal pathway in this bill to apply any of the restrictions on it to a Person, only onto companies.
A random substack article that cites the Mises Caucus [1] and Tim Pool as authorities? Color me shocked that it doesn't make a good argument. I'm open to the idea that this is a bad bill, but this article isn't making a persuasive case.
>The MC and its members have argued for limited immigration enforced by property owners on the border and police action against Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters. They’ve also made anti-trans remarks. Mises-controlled Montana removed the right to abortion from its platform.
Aah yes, my favorite kind of freedom-loving libertarians: temporarily embarrassed dictators.
And sending our colored cousins home again. Big-L Libertarianism is back, baby, and racist as it’s always been. Soon, I expect Jason Calcanis to arrive to explain how this somehow makes the MC the last bastion of the true moderates.
Lysander Spooner was one of the thinkers who lead to American libertarianism, and was first and foremost an abolitionist. Painting a whole intellectual tradition with such a broad brush based on the late in life nonsense spouted by Rothbard or the shitty newsletter Ron Paul used to publish is intellectually dishonest. Among contemporary American Libertarians you'll also find a lot of readers and admirers of Zora Neale Hurston who is often considered along side Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson as a founding mother of American libertarianism. You'll also find that American libertarians have long criticized Woodrow Wilson for re-segregating the government, opposed interracial marriage laws, opposed mass incarceration, and on and on.
Not on it's own, because the constitution doesn't say "Congress shall make no law that binds US citizens". It says a handful of specific things that Congress cannot do, and without knowing exactly what is being blocked, banned, or spied upon I can't say if it's unconstitutional or not.
Tik-tok operating in the US just isnt in the US's interests. It's as simple as that. They don't need to pass your purity test nor prove anything to you.
> What you are suggesting is a malicious, technocratic conspiracy theory that is racist adjacent.
Racism-baiting is a known tool of the CPC. This is strictly a CPC matter and has nothing to do with the people of china, or taiwanese people, or Singaporean Chinese, except one Singaporean Chinese person.
For any US-friendly country TikTok is actually better because China is less likely to both have extradition agreements with US-friendly countries and to reach out do extra-judicial "things" to people it doesn't like, than the US (so long as you're not a Chinese ex-pat, China does seemingly like tapping it's non-resident citizens on the shoulder as a reminder).
The "proper" (ie. snowball's chance in hell) way to fight the problem would be to introduce laws around the tracking, gathering, storing, analysing, packaging, selling, and buying of individual / user profile data.
Tell you what though, if the Fed wants employment figures to go down, such a law would certainly have that effect, lots of companies (that I wouldn't shed a tear over) would be hitting the skids real fast.
The US economy is too dependent upon it though. Gross.
> The "proper" (ie. snowball's chance in hell) way to fight the problem would be to introduce laws around the tracking, gathering, storing, analysing, packaging, selling, and buying of individual / user profile data.
That is exactly what the law is doing but adding laws around "control by a foreign adversarial govt."
Have you been so brainwashed that you think the US government is more of an enemy than China? Why did China hack OPM (every personal data on every fed employee),equifax (credit on all americans) and every major company being hit by their hackers? Do you think it was opportunistic?
F me! This is how the west dies. Like an ostritch with its head buried in sand.
> Have you been so brainwashed that you think the US government is more of an enemy than China?
The US government has detained or killed many more people like me than China has. I don't think that's brainwashing, that's just the reality.
> Why did China hack OPM (every personal data on every fed employee),equifax (credit on all americans) and every major company being hit by their hackers?
Probably the same reason the NSA grabs all that data.
Julian Assange and Harry Dunn are the examples that immediately come to mind - the latter was apparently not 100% intentional, but the point remains that my fellow citizens apparently have zero recourse against getting killed by US spies, and the US will help them evade justice and face no real consequence for it. I can't imagine a Chinese agent getting away with the same thing, although that's perhaps naive.
Yea it is and it isn't a freaking competition. A chinese agent will not harm you unless there is a reason and even in the west they harm their own dissidents.
Julian ans that guy were harmed because they took the fight against the US, are you planning on doing the same? I dare you to go to hong kong and speak up and fight for the liberty if hong kong.
And show me just exactly how HK is more free and has a government that will respect your rights more than the US. You talk like China and the US are even comparable.
Honestly, you people can downvote me all you want but your naivette is putting me and of course yourself un serious harms way.
You stand now enjoying liberty and peace that was hard won and don't consider the stakes.
> Julian ans that guy were harmed because they took the fight against the US, are you planning on doing the same? I dare you to go to hong kong and speak up and fight for the liberty if hong kong.
WTF are you talking about? Neither of the people I mentioned ever went to the US. Assange put information that embarrassed the US on the internet, something you and I do about China all the time.
> And show me just exactly how HK is more free and has a government that will respect your rights more than the US. You talk like China and the US are even comparable.
I just have; HK and China do not get nonresident noncitizens in my country imprisoned or killed; the US does.
> Assange put information that embarrassed the US on the internet
You say embarrassed the US says stolen as in espionage. And the majority of americans support the sentiment against him,snowden,etc...
Try publishing shit china hates and find out. Sony made a movie that embarrased NK and had their corporate network nuked. Show me one person that did that and got away with it.
> just have; HK and China do not get nonresident noncitizens in my country imprisoned or killed; the US does.
Apples and oranges, if China had similar power and interests you have no reason to believe the same or likely worse won't happen to you. What you don't get is this whole topic is about preventing china from becoming such a threat to you. The US has your media and politicians by the the throat that's why things are the current way and you are seriously saying China is better somehow you will be treated better than their own people
> Try publishing shit china hates and find out. Sony made a movie that embarrased NK and had their corporate network nuked.
They got hacked, sure. Did anyone get imprisoned? For years?
> What you don't get is this whole topic is about preventing china from becoming such a threat to you. The US has your media and politicians by the the throat
And I'm supposed to be happy about that? Again, if I'm no freer now than I would be under Chinese hegemony then why should I care whose flag is on the pole?
I don't want Europe bending the knee to China either. But right now America is the bigger threat.
Julian Assange worked with Russia against US interests. The woman who killed Harry Dunn should have been prosecuted in Britain. But it is strange why Britain isn't fighting harder to get her extradited.
Yes, and if we're comparing the overall moral stakes China definitely comes out worse. But if we're talking about the danger to me personally, then the people China is killing are not like me; I'm neither a resident nor a citizen of China.
But that's just fucking it, the US is not going to abandon its interests so now China is also interested in compromising your safety and liberty. You can't change your mind later after an actual conflict starts, this isn't a game with a reset button. Once a civil war starts, ww3 starts,etc... you're stuck with what you have. Even right now most US corps bow to china's governments demands left and right. Because of Chinese influence. They have spies running out of think thanks and confucius centers in US colleges left and right.
Your safety is a precious temporary thing and you are naively working against it.
> But that's just fucking it, the US is not going to abandon its interests so now China is also interested in compromising your safety and liberty.
What safety and liberty do I have if the US government can kill or imprison me on a whim? If I'm supposed to shut up and fall into line either way then it doesn't make any difference whose flag is on the flagpole.
I think the US has better values and principles than that, on the whole. But if you decide that to fight China you've got to turn into China, and that's the direction that laws like this are going, why would anyone support you?
> Even right now most US corps bow to china's governments demands left and right. Because of Chinese influence. They have spies running out of think thanks and confucius centers in US colleges left and right.
Again, fewer, less active, and with less backing, than the NSA equivalent.
You've been breaking the site guidelines badly and frequently lately. This is the kind of thing we ban accounts for. I don't want to ban you, so we need you to please stop doing that.
Please especially don't cross into personal attack, and don't use HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle.
Assuming you’re a US citizen or someone located in a country with an extradition agreement with the US then you’re probably at more risk of the US gov’t messing with your life than China.
That doesn’t excuse any government from being terrible but “enemy” is definitely a relative term here.
Why? That's so silly, it's like saying your local cops are more likely to shoot you than chinese cops, no shit. What does that have to do with this context? The US already has all your data thanks to US bigtech and you are fine enough to post on HN
No, I'm saying as a citizen of a country that's a member of the five-eyes, I'm more likely to be "reachable" by the US than I am China if I was to, for whatever reason, piss them both off.
Some kind of irony hey? (which may be more related to "how the West dies")
To be perfectly clear: I'd rather be living under US rule than Chinese, not that it should matter to this discussion.
I don't like tiktok, but I don't like banning things either so I'm not sure what to do there, but my personal tin-foil hat concerns with it are less about the user data, and more about the ability to drip content amenable to their views as needed to a fairly addicted base. We know troll factories interfere online to keep people angry and support them in believing their worst ideas, why wouldn't the CCP leverage Tik Tok for the same?
Anyway, I'm sad that the Tik Tok issue is being discussed like the only danger is the CCP having access to our stupid videos or the same data the other social media giants have (But what about Google and Facebook!? Well they suck too, let's discuss them after we sort this, or legislate to fix the lot all at once)
To me part of having any reasonable claim to being "better" as a country involves having a better reason for doing something than "well they did it to us first".
Without reciprocity, TikTok is a weapon against which America has no equivalent, and we like to stay even in arms races. Russia has very effectively used the internet to sow dissent in its geopolitical rivals, funding far-left, far-right, and separatist causes in Europe and North America. The Overton window has opened so wide that we don’t even agree on reality in the middle now.
TikTok is a way to collect personality profiles, and a way to push adversarial content to take advantage of these profiles. It can be used as a radicalization machine with very little way of detecting it with counterintelligence.
Now, whether China ever intends to use it this way is another question, as are the appropriate limits of freedom of speech for foreign actors. But the main reason they want to ban it is: it’s a weapon.
I don't think I've seen anything other than yellow scare adjacent innuendo that TikTok actually has any nefarious meddling in their algorithm to push different types of content to American vs Chinese users. Youtube and Facebook have both shown that basic heuristics like showing the user things more likely to keep them on the site and interacting is more than enough to form "radicalization pipelines".
As for the current consensus reality split in the US and other parts of the world I think that issue has been present and rotting at the center of mass media long before TikTok came around. There's also a big observational bias in our current issues where everything is easily documented and distributed we're able to know about all our neighbor's crazy beliefs and the same for people around the world, so maybe our consensus has always been a lot looser than we imagined we just see the crazies more these days (and the crazies see more of each other of course letting them build a wonderful little alt-reality bubble).
I will agree it's definitely much easier for kooks and grifters willing to indulge them to make a buck to find each other these days which has hypercharged the issue.
They're coming after your children with communism and critical race theory. They're going to exploit them, kidnap them, sell them into slavery, and eat them. Mark my words: they're cannibals.
^- the prevailing, unhinged tone that hobgoblins of the uninformed American mind invent and their politicians exploit.
Imagine a basketball game where one team is getting away with fouls. If the other team starts doing it and gets called on it, they can't say "well I know we're doing it, but so is the other team." That exemplifies your point.
Now consider "free" trade. There is no referee. There are no rules akin to the rules of basketball that each team agrees to. It is just two parties that are deciding what is in their own best interest. When one party feels like they have been cheated, why should they carry on as if nothing happened? How is that in their best interest? There are no overarching rules or governance which both parties are subject to. So "not stooping to their level" isn't going to be commended or rewarded by some party.
It's like if you were playing basketball at the park and your opponent repeatedly fouled you but insisted fouls are legal. If you want to perform well, either you find a different team to play against or you start fouling back.
The difference is that USA is using its social networks for many years already to overthrow governments in multiple countries by organizing protests, and that's why some countries started to ban them.
Tiktok is getting banned because USA is afraid, that China is gonna use it against USA the same way.
Nobody thinks TikTok is going to be used to overthrow the US government. TikTok is getting banned because doing so is in the interests of American tech companies, particularly Facebook. Why should they have to compete on an uneven playing field, after all?
It’s not anti-TikTok, its anti privacy. If they explicitly banned TikTok, at least it would have been honest. This is about banning your rights to secure communication.
3. It is about an enemy govt. having access to US population's data.
#3 is a valid thing and the US govt should act on it.
This is the same kind of logic that people spout to justify Chinese police stations in the US (The US has police stations in the US why can't China have Chinese police stations in the US? The answer to Chinese police on US soil is not a blanket restriction on all police.)
Technically china is not considered to be an enemy state. It would be really hard to justify that, unless you had some evidence (which must exist somewhere) of Chinese military officials labeling the US as an enemy state and enacting a reciprocity law (which afaict does not exist currently).
I'm curious what people think about tiktok' plans. They vowed to move data into us soil and have external audits. It came across as actual good faith compromises from my perspective.
Americans haven't been drinking enough anti-china information. Barely anyone in this country knows that a 4 year old uighur girl died in an apartment fire and she couldn't escape because the CPC officials had welded the doors shut because of COVID.
Meanwhile, we do criticize ourselves in this country, a lot. And that's a good thing. Try protesting about police brutality in China. In the US you might be a hero. In China, nonzero odds you'll disappear.
Politically, it can't. Because it's done way worse shit inside its own borders, against people, whom it has a moral responsibility to protect, and legally, too, by being a signatory to various un human right conventions. The us invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were shitty but you would be very hard pressed to argue that it was a systematic killing and erasure of culture, considering how many people the US military didn't kill.
By contrast, china is actively erasing uighur culture, for example, by domiciling han men with uighur women (I am being too kind. What is going on is rape), systematically killing uighur men, and repressing language, banning religious gatherings, etc.
You don't understand American history if you're making those claims. I'm a minority, whose ancestors came to this country as indentured servants, owned by a company, so kindly sit the fuck down. In any case the US actively seeks to reduce these things while china actively ramps up its human rights abuses in 2023. Your whataboutism is transparent and hamfisted. You are an apologist for an ongoing genocide. Don't ever forget that for the rest of your life.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, political/ideological/national battle comments, and taking threads further into flamewar? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Just to be clear, I'm not criticizing your views (I don't even know what they are, exactly), I'm saying that if you're going to post about this stuff we need you to follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Lol china kills Muslims too. Look. Neither is good. At least in the US we are free to criticize it so that hopefully in the future the US doesn't do that shit anymore. And hey guess what we are definitely killing Muslims at a lower rate now. And china is killing Muslims at a higher rate now! Trajectories are important.
The premise is not that, it’s that the Chinese government can influence the content that the US population is exposed to. For fucks sake, US politicians are campaigning on a platform that the CCP can manipulate.
So if we ban the TikTok app and everyone just moves to the TikTok web page, what are we going to do? Ban the web page too?
If we do ban the web page, on what grounds? If we claim that the web page collects too much data and is a national security threat, then doesn't that same argument apply to all of the millions of web pages out there?
Or do we just skip all pretense and start strengthening the national firewall?
I don’t know. I’m not advocating for a ban, just arguing against all the moronic “but what about US social media” and “it’s because the US government can’t spy on TikTok users” takes.
The US government and US companies are different appendages of billionaires: one is a fictional personhood while the other is a collective public administration that has more lobbyists than administrators, but both service the same masters.
The concerning part is a foreign government with whom we have a quasi-antagonistic relationship being able to access detailed information on US citizens.
Imagine you work at Goldman Sachs, along with 50,000 other people. Like a lot of your colleagues, you use TikTok. You often open the app at work. Maybe you have something embarrassing in your search history. China uses location data, wifi matching, or even a list of names to figure out that you work at Goldman and they know you might be susceptible to blackmail.
And then they get you to check in some malicious code that damages the financial sector.
That's why the US is going to ban TikTok. It's also why the US forced the sale of Grindr.
That's also a concern, and the comparison people draw is that we wouldn't let China own CNN. But I think the national security concerns are mainly around sensitive data (similar to the forced sale of Grindr).
> The concerning part is a foreign government with whom we have a quasi-antagonistic relationship being able to access detailed information on US citizens.
And before we argue about whether or not Tik-tok can access this data, consider that we can be certain that they can't access it if they're banned. There is no obligation to prove that China is exploiting the US in order to justify a ban of Tik-tok.
There is no question on whether China can access TikTok data. China has total control as long as TikTok is owned by ByteDance and the executives of ByteDance are physically located in China. No laws necessary. Give us the data or you disappear for a year.
It's as simple as you say. By virtue of Chinese law we must assume they have access. but it's not even necessary to prove. Simply not being in the US's interests is good enough reason.
Why do you think there would be a convincing argument?
It’s all politics, grandstanding, and power. If you want to ban something and have the ability to make it happen, why let the lack of a convincing argument stand in your way?
But are you a reasonable person? And does your opinion even matter to anyone but yourself? That you're not convinced seems of no consequence to anyone here.
Tik-tok is not in the US's interests. I agree that social media is toxic in general. I would argue Tik-tok is even more so (by means of their algorithm and short attention span videos). But that's besides the point. It offer's China a potential strategic advantage. There doesn't really need to be any more reason that that.
The real victims of China's policy are their own population who, as a result, does not have access to information that the government deems "bad". So the real victims of the US equivalent policy would be who again? Because I assure you TikTok will be fine. But now a precedent will have been set for the US government banning apps from citizens' phones for national security reasons.
Doubtful a TikTok ban would come in the form of banning users from using the app, exactly because that infringes on individual liberties. Ban is being used loosely: it Most likely would come in the form of disallowing direct access, blocking ip ranges, etc, corporate dissolution, blocking TikTok from banking system, or the like. With no penalty for an individual who circumvents TikTok access.
The situation that is most likely is that the government will make it so that nobody really wants to use TikTok anymore, or possibly, that TikTok can't afford to operate in the states.
This sort of stuff the us does all the time (cryptocurrency exchanges, online gambling, porn sites, e.g.).
The us also has a history of redomiciling companies. For example that one time the US redomiciled the entire us operations of a pharma company that was, you know, supporting a genocide.
If some politician wanted to be clever, all they would have to do is say if any company more than 10% owned by a state or with any state employees in management positions sells arms to Russia or Russian countries, then all companies more than 10% owned by that state or with that state's state employees in management positions is subject to sanctions. Kill two birds with one stone.
It is indeed a country of far more liberty than China. The simple fact that the uniparty government can rewrite the Chinese constitution at will says everything you need to know.
Unless you think China is a role model it probably isn't. As Milton Friedman said, don't do to yourself what you do to an enemy in times of war. A ban on TikTok is doing to your own people what trade sanctions are to a foreign country.
Are you kidding me? Maybe you are not up to date with the state of CCP and their leader or the kind of messed up spying tiktok does?
Look here, it's not just collecting information about you, virtually everything on your phone and every device in your LAN it scans and collecte data. What other social media does and what other social media is so popular AOC is even protesting (literally) over it?
This shit is honestly scaring me it is like America is not just divided but divided by two foreign powers.
Never thought I would long for the communist scare of the 50s I read about in box and movies.
You people do not realize your entire country and way of life is a few moments away from collapse. The CCP can and has forced tech companies into doing whatever it wants and the amount and nature of data tiktok is collecting can legitimately used in wartime or to destabilize america. This is not a scare or a conspiracy, it's the real deal. Why are you not terrified?
If the table was reversed hoe long do you think it would be before the US could destabilize China and force a regime change?
I mean wtf!!! I honestly feel like I am living on a different planet than 75% of the population and that population is also living on two different planets.
Do you not freaking realize how good you have it in America and the west as a whole?
virtually everything on your phone and every device in your LAN it scans and collecte data
If this was true you'd be right, but it is mostly fear mongering and incorrect. It is just a typical app, running in a sandbox, collecting the data you give it permission to collect.
You are not alone in your sentiments. Anyone that has a pulse on the USG’s security posture knows exactly what’s going on here. At any moment, the CCP can press their finger on the scale of public opinion, manipulating 150 million Americans at once. We already saw how Facebook, Google, and Twitter royally fvcked the last election cycle, incited violence across the country, and divided us during COVID... that was a coordinated effort between domestic tech companies and government agencies (fact, not opinion). Imagine what's possible when a foreign country enters the chat, especially when public trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
Roughly 50% of the American population is using TikTok. Folks ought to chew on that thought for a moment.
So since russia is an adversary, and scihub is ran by either russian national or resident, any academic who interacted with it might fall under sec 11 (penalties).
I don't think so? Reading the bill, it specifically allows the executive to disallow 'covered transactions' and defines the prohibited activity in terms of those transactions, so even if they designated SciHub as a national security threat an academic would have to aid SciHub in carrying out transactions in order to be subject to penalties.
Then I don’t understand, how it will prevent TikTok.
Here is a def of transaction from the bill:
(17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.
Does it mean you can’t install an app developed by an adversary and App Store can be liable for letting you do this?
It will destroy TikTok, the company owned by ByteDance, which would achieve the same effect. Given how unprecedented it would be for the US to try to set up its own 'great firewall', I imagine they view hitting the corporate entity as the easier path.
In any case, in order to put TikTok on the App Store, they have to pay to join the Apple Developer program; Apple would be prohibited from taking the money if TikTok was designated a national security threat. The same might even go for facilitating the installation of TikTok via the App Store.
I started to read it; 1/3 of the way through and I’m not losing any sleep (yet?). I’d like an actual knowledgeable attorney’s point of view; I’ve completely lost trust in what “important tech people” have to say.
The first third is just definitions. The actual bill begins in section 3. In legal text that will be controversial, look for poorly defined terms that are regularly repeated. During net neutrality days the term was "reasonable network management" which was never defined and gave large operators a carveout to engage in acts contrary to the ideals of net neutrality, even under net neutrality. Here the term seems to be "safety of United States persons." It's used 6 times in multiple contexts and never defined. What does it mean? Well, whatever "they" want it to mean. So, look at section 3 and remove unnecessary language and you get:
The secretary is authorized to engage in [any action] to prevent/prohibit/disrupt/... [any risk] arising from [any covered transaction] that the secretary determines poses an undue risk to the "safety of United States persons."
The "covered transactions" comes down to anything even possibly subject to influence by a "foreign adversary." A foreign adversary is anybody who engages in conduct adverse to the "safety of United States persons", which apparently includes countries like Cuba and Venezuela, among the ones you might otherwise expect. And how do you expect to block all of this? You're looking at the start of the Great Firewall of America.
When I read news about banning TikTok in the US, I keep thinking about whether the EU should ban the same way Twitter and Facebook.
I am really undecided (just like with the TikTok ban), but I can't see how the same arguments couldn't be used to justify a EU-wide US social media ban.
These ban are primarily political in nature. US and China are at a cold war, so see these actions from that perspective. Privacy, User protection are mostly just front.
Forcing a sale to a trusted owner and complete audit of the codebase/infrastructure solves the problem in a much better way. I'm not sure why TikTok needs to be banned.
If TikTok would rather close than sell, that's fine too. In general I don't agree with government forcing things like these, but if they're going to intervene at least do it right.
Banning it outright comes across as a handout to the other social media companies
The bill will ban transactions with foreign companies (in specific instances). Being able to ban (aka regulate) international transactions is nothing like the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act allowed surveillance and secret data collection against US citizens, and made it illegal to notify those being collected against, and all without due process or any kind of warrant, just a letter from the executive branch insisting they needed to collect the data.
If you attempted to bring the government to court to defend your rights, they would simply refuse to admit they collected your information and the court would dismiss the case since there was no way to show harm. There is no way to prevent a financial transaction without revealing that the transaction was prevented, so the cowardly tactics used by the government to avoid scrutiny of the Patriot Act can't be used here.
I would be wary of the comparison between this and the Patriot Act, and I wonder about the motivation of those making it.
> If you attempted to bring the government to court to defend your rights, they would simply refuse to admit they collected your information and the court would dismiss the case since there was no way to show harm.
Bought to you by the Supreme Court's 1980s pivot towards "standing" weaselry. A right without a remedy is somehow still a right. That and $5.50 will get you an express bus into Seattle.
I don't know. The Republicans in general are just Democrats 10 years late. They were against gay marriage - now, well, Trump isn't actually willing to upset that apple cart despite the press. 10 years ago they were complaining about government spending, now they sign stimulus checks like the rest even if the Green New Deal is too much to stomach (for now)...
On the flip side, Democrats are just the Republicans from two decades ago. Biden pushing for stronger border patrols, shutting down striking unions, and opening oil drilling is pretty bog standard Republicanism from the 2000s.
The two parties differ in how they view some minorities, but honestly, they're pretty alike in the broad strokes.
We've banned this account, not because you're criticizing HN (that's fine), but because you've been using HN primarily for political battle, as well as creating lots of accounts to break the site guidelines with. Please don't do that.
Whether it's the internet, rock n roll, dungeons and dragons, Elvis gyrating his hips, the red scare, mods and rockers, violence in games, or even the printed word, there's always someone coming out and saying "X has turned everyone into Y".
Using social engineering to fuck with your life is also much harder and more expensive when their hardcore supporters don't even speak the same language you do and they don't have support from the authorities to force you to do anything. They can't threaten to arrest you the same way an agent working for the US could.
The US on the other hand will get to you regardless of where you are in the world. They will go as far as killing state leaders and journalists overseas. Even as a US citizen living in the US, they literally passed laws under Obama that allows the US government to drone strike US citizens for national security reasons without a trial.