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The Clean Network – United States Department of State

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Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#401
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this anyways. Why would I pay postage to have something brought to a distribution center 20 miles away, wait a few days, then brought back to my town to get delivered to town hall when I can literally walk there and drop it off for free?

Because time is money? first class postage is only 55 cents, that's hard to beat from a dollars per hour spent perspective.

With everything coming out about how mail in ballots are being delayed and otherwise messed with and who knows what else is in store, what is the value of ensuring your vote gets counted relative to your time dropping it off personally?

That seems the more pertinent question.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any resources the US spends in conflict with China are resources it can't spend in conflict with Russia. The US is relatively weaker, Russia is relatively stronger. 5G is just one small piece of the puzzle.

Russia is not relatively stronger than the U.S. by any metric. And we're not in conflict with Russia. China is the #2 economy in the world...it got there at a blistering pace and it has a population advantage over the U.S. by about 3x or 4x. China has been known to steal technology from U.S. firms and universities. It's been known to spy. They have vast amounts of electronics manufacturing capacity and can completely…

weaker and stronger relative to where they were before.

A point here, a point there. That's real strategy.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#404
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People suspected the NSA were snooping and introducing backdoors and proactively places countermeasures against that. Why should the standard be different when it comes to China?

The standard shouldn't be any different and that's precisely the problem here: * NSA is a governmental agency that by construction is tied to the state. Bytedance, Huawai and Tencent are privately owned companies in China and all "ties" to the Chinese governments are unsubstantiated. Blanket ban on private companies because of their country of origin and unsubstantiated suspicions results in clear discrimination and…

People have been warning about BSafe and Dual_EC_DRBG for years before Snowden came along. Privacy advocates and security professionals had been placing out a blanket warning of "government" snooping for decades before Snowden. Richard Stallman, the guy who wrote most of the Gnu utils back in the days, had been signing his emails with M-x spook, which had been in Emacs since 1988. The Internet started out anti-spook way back in the days.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#405
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disruptions would be there for sure. But I think building up that kind of capability is necessarily single-use only, and only makes sense if your goal is to use it as a direct prelude to an invasion of a country. Because people will relatively quickly discover where the problems came from, punish whoever's responsible and then switch manufacturers. I don't see how this could be of benefit to secret services whether f…

Just OSS isn't going to solve the paranoia around hidden backdoors in Chinese manufactured network equipment. A tiny co-processor looking for a trigger to brick the rest of the device would maybe require delidding to notice. The old adage is once they get access to your hardware there's very little in the way of attackers doing anything, how do you secure something when it's being manufactured almost 100% by an 'atta…

That's of course true. Which is another reason why I think that eg voting computers are an inherently bad idea (independently of who manufactures them). But my main point was that this sort of capability embedded in routers can only be used once and likely only in an end of the world scenario and therefore is of limited interest to "China".

Now I'm wondering whether I'm mistaken? If my connection to a website/device is properly encrypted (SSL/TLS), can a mitm attack (eg by an embedded hw bug) strip that encryption away? If so, that would be bad and would invalidate large parts of my argument above. If it doesn't however, then it wouldn't really matter that much I think. Unless... the device somehow saves a copy of the traffic for later decryption with better hardware down the line. That seems doable but not really feasible at scale. (Then again, maybe a few bugs in the routers installed at a few critical facilities or locations like downtown DC are enough to gobble up enough juicy traffic?)

I think on the whole it was a bad idea to offshore virtually all production capabilities for chips and computer hardware. (This is especially true for Europe which lost its hw production to Asia and its software production to the US.) Now we have to cope with this situation as it is though, and it seems to me that the best way to do that is to improve transparency by doing what I wrote above, radically reducing complexity of protocols and the tech stack (eg openssl vs wireguard) and forcing companies to clean up their act wrt IT practices. Not easy at all, I know.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amnesty International has interviewed more than 400 people who have reported disappearances and sometimes torture in Xinjiang. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/12/ozils-uyghur-... >I never said that China was "ok", I simply pointed out the hypocrisy that is I'm sure you think this is helpful, but this is a false equivalence that, for practical purposes, serves to derail necessary and needed criticisms of C…

Amnesty international has a troubled history. https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troublin... Luis Kutner was a co-founder of Amnesty international, and Kutner would go on to form the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the New York Times, after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO — wa…

Oh, I'm very aware of these JV debate team talking points about Amnesty International. I would just dismiss those as not relevant and point you toward some courses on remedial critical thinking skills to better understand what kinds of evidence are relevant to what kinds of claims, specifically how the signal diminishes as you increase the degrees of separation from your evidence and the content you are trying to apply it to.

This is several degrees of abstraction away from the point about Uighurs, so unless you are claiming Luis Kutner's actions in the 60s have a specific, direct evidentiary connection to the 400 instances of Uighur testimony about disappearances and torture across the world from the past few years, the only thing I can do for you is try to help explain how to critically think about evidence and its connection to different kinds of claims, and how to understand when it does and doesn't weigh on particular claims.

Did you have anything specific to the issue of Uighur testimony you would like to share that's not from 60 years ago? Is there a particular line in the wiki article or mintpressnews that you linked that directly and specifically debunks all 400 pieces of testimony?

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China. >If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state. This is conflating a differentiation for a justification . We can form coherent thoughts about the relative scale of abuses committed by different powers…

> This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China. No. The comment said the US is a liberal democracy. Not "closer", IS. It's like "hey, this number is 100!" - "no, that number is 13" - "but 13 is closer to 100 than 2".

I'm just going to note that you glazed over about 95% of the substance of my comment and re-direct you back toward that.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amnesty international has a troubled history. https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troublin... Luis Kutner was a co-founder of Amnesty international, and Kutner would go on to form the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the New York Times, after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO — wa…

Oh, I'm very aware of these JV debate team talking points about Amnesty International. I would just dismiss those as not relevant and point you toward some courses on remedial critical thinking skills to better understand what kinds of evidence are relevant to what kinds of claims, specifically how the signal diminishes as you increase the degrees of separation from your evidence and the content you are trying to app…

Sure, here is an example of these "testimonies", and how their stories changed:

After: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7599941/Whistleblow...

Before: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-everyone-was-s...

If you looked at the second link I provided about Nayirah and Desert Storm, you would realize that my concerns about Amnesty and testimonies are inextricably linked. They "corroborated" her testimony. Bear in mind this was in the early 90's, not 1960.

Watch the testimony, and then read the video description. Its all public record.

https://youtu.be/LmfVs3WaE9Y

The facts of the matter are that there HAVE been radical Islamic terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. The Chinese are dealing with the nature of this problem. The extent to which "atrocities" are occurring is constantly stated, yet somehow the numbers are always inflated, stories are changing, none of it adds up.

More sources and references:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/ehrd6y/cmv_th...

If you want a REAL deep dive:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0lynghlCnR6Hs57pypEEhlh...

Here is a video from April of this year in Xinjiang, one of the terrorist attacks is included in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oKvulTU8oU&bpctr=1597232967

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I'm very aware of these JV debate team talking points about Amnesty International. I would just dismiss those as not relevant and point you toward some courses on remedial critical thinking skills to better understand what kinds of evidence are relevant to what kinds of claims, specifically how the signal diminishes as you increase the degrees of separation from your evidence and the content you are trying to app…

Sure, here is an example of these "testimonies", and how their stories changed: After: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7599941/Whistleblow... Before: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-everyone-was-s... If you looked at the second link I provided about Nayirah and Desert Storm, you would realize that my concerns about Amnesty and testimonies are inextricably linked. They "corroborated" her testimo…

This all over the place.

You asked for evidence supporting 'the accusations in Xinjiang.' I posted some. Since then, most of your reply has had nothing to do with that. None of the material you linked previously was directly related to Uighurs. And now you've come back with a second trove of links, and instead of explaining them you're inviting me to wade through a huge trove links that apparently imply somethingorother that you just can't get around to stating in plain language.

The most relevant appears to be a pair of articles that support a half-baked argument that someone's testimony has changed, although you aren't clearly stating how it changed, and it's not clear that your interpretation of that is one that I would share. And to the extent that there's an argument here at all that relates to Uighurs, it appears to depend on using a single account to disprove an entire trove of 400 interviews, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how different kinds of evidence balance against each other.

That's in addition to the comprehension issue regarding how evidence diminishes in weight the further it is removed from the subject - the connection between stuff from 60 years ago on a different subject doesn't balance against Amnesty's work in the present the way you seem to think it does.

And again, I'm very familiar with the copy+pasted talking points from /r/Sino. For the most part, you still haven't directly addressed the veracity of the interviews, you've just attempted to turn the whole conversation into a pandora's box of digressions with unclear connections to the specific question you were originally asking about. This is more an exercise in Qanon-style free association than an expression of a coherent thought that logically addresses specific arguments.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Politico one about the German intelligence findings? Or the fact that Huawei is a de-facto public company, with massive subsidies by the CDB? https://www.rfi.fr/en/contenu/20190530-huawei-key-beneficiar... Huawei inked a $10 billion credit line with the China Development Bank (CDB) in 2004 to provide low-cost financing to customers buying its telecom gear. It was tripled to $30 billion in 2009. https://www.ws…

I don't know why you tell me that, I'm not arguing anything, I'm just pointing out that Bloomberg is a bad source because they are making false claims and do not correct them. > Thus, all major Chinese corporations are a extension of the CCP. I believe that to be true. I also believe that to be true for all corporations in all nations. They're independent from the state until it matters.

See, that's a false equivalence, as the degree of entanglement between state and corporation matters, as well as how much workers would defy corporate policy aligning the company with the state, for e.g. ethical reasons.

I don't buy the cynical well, they're all the same. ByteDance employees attend CCP-indoctrination meetings in the regular. Is that the case for any US corporation? How many of them are lead by former former military, like Huawei?

So, no.

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