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Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

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Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#61
post #3

That's roughly 10% of the population (23M). At its peak, the Stasi in the DDR had files on about 30% of the East German population.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make...

Their surveillance efforts have reached roughly the same order of magnitude as the Stasi, and (as others point out) with far less effort.

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#62
post #19

My friend from China explained to me that the surveillance of people is as much top down as much as its bottom up. - At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor. - At the city l…

The thing with informants is they can lie. They can pretend the loyalists are dissenters and the dissenters are loyalists. They can tell stories just because they personally don't like someone. They can demand protection money. It's vastly more fragile and unreliable than a system based on technology.

Sure the engineers can make the system lie. And they probably will to some extent. But it's a much smaller number of people you need to keep pleased and policed.

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#63
post #19

My friend from China explained to me that the surveillance of people is as much top down as much as its bottom up. - At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor. - At the city l…

How is that different from people working for FB Or Google? It's same there, a few of them are financially rewarded for pushing privacy evanding tactics and others silently follow otherwise risk being reported.

Except Facebook and Google aren't operating mass incarceration camps that target people solely based on ethnic/religious affiliation. The moral dubiousness of working for Google isn't the same as working as an informant for the Chinese secret police.

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#65
post #22

This is so sad: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

Reminds me of the United State's lockdown of Middle Easterners, and the surveillance police state that got legally empowered by post-9/11 doctrine.

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.

You've been doing this too much. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have you made ~5-6 comments in this thread, and all about some version of whataboutism?

I reject the accusation of "whataboutism". Let's take those in order. "Why have I made 5~6 comments in the thread?" It's an interesting topic that I've spent over 5 years researching. "Why are you talking about the United States in a China thread?" I think this comment captures it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185364

> "Why have I made 5~6 comments in the thread?" It's an interesting topic that I've spent over 5 years researching.

By my count, you've made 13 comments in this thread so far, which is about 20% of the current total.

I don't think you've spent "over 5 years" researching surveillance China. It seems like you may have spent that much time researching surveillance in the US (but I have my doubts), and are very intent on derailing the thread into a discussion of that instead of the article content about China.

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#68
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China could probably go much further. In America, you're shut down and surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets you). Much of that surveillance is automatic, and fed into police threat scores and FBI databases based off of online conversations (like this one) and other information (including financials, p…

This is a false equivalence. Your second paragraph is just conspiracy theory. "It's all same" is cynical and unintelligent attitude.

I'm so absolutely tired of people dismissing very real concerns and positions of people with the term "conspiracy theory"! First of all, gp isn't wrong, those things do happen in America and we have had plenty of proof leak over the years to back that up. Second, the entire history of the world is chock-full of conspiracy, so to dismiss points so blithely and naively as " conspiracy theory" indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Third, has everyone just forgotten that the term itself was pushed post JFK assassination as a psyop tool by the CIA to discredit anyone who questioned the Warren commission?

If it weren't for Snowden many of us who had been ranting about the NSA would still be getting dismissed with off-hand remarks of "conspiracy theorist" with a condescending undertone. Yet even as those of us warning about these issues move on to tell people about the next thing, we get the same thing. Even worse, after being proved right by Wikileaks or Snowden etc, those same people are still making excuses for their failure to heed those warnings. For example, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to start talking about NSA and to get "yeah we'll, we knew about echelon, it wasn't a surprise" type comments. Yes, those of us paying attention knew, but the problem is that we all got dismissed by smugly idiotic people with phrases like "crackpot conspiracy theorist"...

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from people working for FB Or Google? It's same there, a few of them are financially rewarded for pushing privacy evanding tactics and others silently follow otherwise risk being reported.

Except Facebook and Google aren't operating mass incarceration camps that target people solely based on ethnic/religious affiliation. The moral dubiousness of working for Google isn't the same as working as an informant for the Chinese secret police.

Facebook does play a pretty direct role in the ongoing Rohingya genocide.

Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang

#70
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false equivalence. Your second paragraph is just conspiracy theory. "It's all same" is cynical and unintelligent attitude.

I'm so absolutely tired of people dismissing very real concerns and positions of people with the term "conspiracy theory"! First of all, gp isn't wrong, those things do happen in America and we have had plenty of proof leak over the years to back that up. Second, the entire history of the world is chock-full of conspiracy, so to dismiss points so blithely and naively as " conspiracy theory" indicates a lack of knowle…

"Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument. I'm aware that they happen and I'm worried.

They just don't happen in the same scale and they don't have as bad consequences for people.

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