For US citizens, this might be irrelevant (not so much if we go by the leaks). But for everyone living anywhere else on the globe, owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access.
I understand that it is the price I have to pay for a free (sic) OS and play services. But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative.
And I have about as much choice as someone in the market for a decent quadcopter unwilling to send data to China.
Further you dismiss the parent comment as implying the US and China’s surveillance are equivalent, but I don’t see that as the claim. There is a lot of shocked surprise in the news when we find that China is doing something we don’t like with our data or computers, but we ignore that the NSA builds massive data centers for data on the global population, we kill people based on that data, and we also engage in a global hacking war. And I think it’s important to make sure that when we talk about China, we’re also willing to talk about the US. If we never talk about what we do, someone else’s bad behavior will look warped.
The US and China are not equivalent, but it’s hard to talk about one fairly in this context without mentioning the other.
But what does THAT have to do with using data vaccuumed up from overseas?
Microsoft Windows takes all your passwords and the CIA or FBI can legally give them a warrant to get the data. The NSA also probably has a nice backdoor.
Why would another country be OK with this? Especially for sensitive info.
Same for other operating systems.
Are you saying that since the US has better freedom of speech for its own citizens, therefore trusting it not to do anything harmful to people in another country makes way more sense?
Edit: to->too d'oh
Although I do think that there's something to the idea of, 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.'
Don't forget parallel construction and planted evidence.
I don't know if you're referring to the US or China
i don't think these protections apply to the people outside of US. The same way whatever laws China has wouldn't apply to for example the people in US, ie. outside of China.
Also it reminded about that typical arrangement when UK spies on the people inside US at the request of US government and vise versa in order to workaround those domestic legal protections.
Not to mention the blanket surveillance, use of Stingrays without a warrant and near total lack of privacy law.
The US might not be as _bad_ as China but it's still far from _good_.
This means that based on the current applied interpretation of the norms, there are two classes of people: those who ‘deserve’ rights, and have them, and those who do not. And if you are a foreigner, you do not.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
> The U.S. has strong legal language against unreasonable search and seizure which is usually ignored when inconvenient for the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Fixed that for you.
I would be worried about what would happen if a similar highly public spat over an encryption issue happens under the current US administration - it's abundantly clear that the politics of this issue and the facts are not in alignment, Trump would doubtless adore the publicity of it. At any rate, I'd imagine San Bernadino is almost certainly not the last time this is going to be a national political issue, in the USA or elsewhere.
This of course pales in comparison to China though.
> The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure
So long as you stay the hell away from an airport...
And those Android phones are made by companies around the world. Samsung phones send data to South Korea, Hauwei to China, etc... Some Android phones are sold without Google's apps and send nothing to their servers, so you're not really correct on that.
In what universe is LineageOS not a viable alternative?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/14/dji-adds-an-offline-mode-t...
>owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access.
At least as much as you can while carrying around a radio transmitter. Replicant is also a thing.
Wikipedia actually shows this newer usage of it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic:
"Ironic use" of sic[edit]
Occasionally a writer places [sic] after his or her own words, to indicate that
the language has been chosen deliberately for special effect, especially where
the writer's ironic meaning may otherwise be unclear.[18] Bryan A. Garner dubbed
this use of sic "ironic", providing the following example from Fred Rodell's 1955
book Nine Men:[2]
[I]n 1951, it was the blessing bestowed on Judge Harold Medina's prosecution
[sic] of the eleven so-called 'top native Communists,' which blessing meant
giving the Smith Act the judicial nod of constitutionality.I don't really agree with this. Intentions matter; the act of breaking into a house is way different if it's done to stop an in-progress assault vs. commit one.
It can obviously be argued in the actual scenario we're discussing how benevolent / evil / potentially unknowable the actors we're talking about actually are, but I don't think intention is irrelevant.
It's not really the intention that matters, but the circumstances motivating the action initially.
Example: murder in the course of self defence as "justifiable homicide" or the warranted tapping of someone's phone under supervision of the judiciary
The issue occurs here because those traditional national lines, which happen to also include cultural lines, are themselves being violated and we have no effective incidental means of addressing or justifying the act.
> The court ruled in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) that all criminal charge-related elements of the Constitution's amendments (the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and the 14th) such as search and seizure, self-incrimination, trial by jury and due process, protect non-citizens, legally or illegally present.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes...
(I am not an expert and would appreciate a better source or explanation.)
This is still limited to people on us soil :/
Really? One of the Great Firewall's primary use cases is to prevent data that could be used for surveillance to leave the nation.
China prohibits all sorts of data from leaving through the Great Firewall, such as telemetry.
> "The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware."
We are definitely the leader when it comes to foreign surveillance. When it comes to domestic, however, China is easily winning. They don't even hide it -- they require practically all interesting data to be available for their use by law.
Officials of the BND admitted it in a parliamentary hearing, too.
Highly maneuverable portable drones are going to be a key part of urban conflict in the next century of the ongoing war in the middle east, just as the RPG and IED have been.
Ah, yes. The same reasons the Army no longer uses any helicopters at all.
The head of the BND stated that the BND did not record any information about Germans, and the NSA did not record any information about Americans, but that the BND shared whatever it collected about Americans with the NSA, and in reverse.
>Explain how anyone would think that works.
US government lawyers explained how torture is legal. Compare to that, the circumventing of the 4th by means of allies doing the actual spying ... i'd be surprised if they even bothered to explain it away.