Comment by mempko
4 days ago
I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's if I give my data to Google or Meta.
4 days ago
I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's if I give my data to Google or Meta.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#...
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The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
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From China’s perspective, the things the US intelligence official could to China’s citizens is worse than what China could do to those same citizens.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some citizens to feel the same
4 replies →
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?