Comment by palata
4 days ago
Depends on where you start the thread. Before your comment, this thread was simply "this is US protectionism and not really national security".
After your first comment, this thread was "the USA are an information security risk".
My point is that of course, from the US point of view, China abusing its power is worse than the US abusing their power. But if you take a step back... why should a European citizen consider that what China is doing is worse than what the US are doing?
It has been proven that the US have been targeting European politicians with spying. It has been proven that the NSA was collecting private information about just everything they could (including US citizen BTW). The richest people on Earth control the biggest tech companies on Earth and are getting closer to the US president every day. Some of those people are actively trying to influence politics in Europe (e.g. promoting neo-nazis in Germany, I don't know if you understand what it means there). The US president is talking about invading Greenland, Panama etc. And you talk about links between the Chinese government and Chinese companies?
If TikTok is a strong national security risk for the US, then Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple are all strong security risks for Europe. But what would the US say if Europe banned those companies? Probably more "it's a free market, it's democracy, it's capitalism, you can't do that!" than "fair enough, we do it too, and China does it too", right?
That's where I find it ironic. The US promote free market when it's about having their companies in other countries. But when the roles are inverted, then the US behave a lot more like China than like Europe (by banning companies), don't they?
Lots of ideas but you are missing the simple point. The CCP is partnered with their companies and actively support corporate espionage. Its a fact that the five eyes spy on lots of people including their own citizens. Some of this is certainly based off recent history but the way I frame it is China adulterates almost every piece of data they release. They limit their incoming internet. They aggressively monitor their citizens and will cull information on social media proactively. They participate in corporate espionage that sounds like its from a fiction story. Corporations in China are in some form or another tightly partnered with the government once they reach a massive scale. To find irony is to ignore everything China is doing. Again, absolutely everyone is running foreign intelligence. The difference is I don't believe anyone is as worried of drones made outside of China but its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Feels like your view is "whatever we do is okay, as long as we can point to someone else doing worse". Is that what you are saying?
> its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection magically embedded into it. So you can be completely offline while you fly your mission.
Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to see it? Why not instructing government operators to only connect through a router that filters the network? And that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you don't have to trust.
Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of critical information? What would that be, a location? Why wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?
If it is obvious, please explain the national security threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with a simple external firewall.