Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides.
>Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive.
Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you.
>So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China?
What are you talking about?
>very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive
You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
> several U.S. services work without a VPN
Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network.
> I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.
Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.
No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN.
Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Are you interested in talking about surveillance specifically or every talking point of the usual anti-American tirades?
> Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Yes, independent review by a board or committee separate from the defense intelligence complex who will help determine if the information is actually damaging or if it's just some bullshit a midlevel staffer at the Pentagon determined is 'damaging.'
As an American, I am deeply disturbed by the complete absence of transparency of these programs to Congress and the American people. And honestly I'm not convinced that the people running these programs have any ability to see the forest for the trees, or if they're not just some D.C. automaton skilled enough at groupthink and not asking questions to get the tippity-top security clearance.
Is it a drooling idiot running the program? Dunno. Classified.
Their spying on Americans is reviewed by judges and courts. They get warrants for every american they spy on.
The senate intelligence committee may (behind closed doors and under the oath of secrecy) inquire about just about anything the intelligence community does.
The president may at his or her sole discretion declassify any information.
Haven't you heard, the first rule of conflict is "all warfare is deception"? Try running a state with zero secrets and see how far you get.
Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder. Snowden cleared that one up.
Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee. That's like calling the police commission an independent committee. Even if they were, how would we even know if they're not just rubberstamping stuff?
Congress is in the dark. Remember Niger?
"We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing. So John McCain is going to try to create a new system to make sure that we can answer the question (about) why we were there," he said. "We'll know how many soldiers are there, and if somebody gets killed there, that we won't find out about it in the paper."
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked later on "Meet the Press" about knowing whether there were troops in Niger, he responded, "No, I did not."
If they don't even know where we have troops doing mildly classified stuff, how much do you think they know about black programs that are totally off the books?
The president has thus far decided things like, 'huh, the Coronavirus is a lot worse than everyone thinks...in February...better not tell anyone about it and we should do absolutely nothing to prepare' classified. Great guy to have in charge of that.
Think about the people we're actually fighting wars against? Do you think elaborate deception has made a sliver of difference in any conflict fought by the United States in the past 60 years?
We need transparency and civilian oversight. I'm not afraid of an Afghan Taliban fighter knowing our super secret plan to spy on the planet. I am afraid of a defense intelligence complex that has shown zero hesitancy in the past to spy on Americans and is increasingly operating in the shadows with little oversight outside of the White House.
This whole system is not engineered for the benefit of the American people. It's a juggernaut of bureaucracy and secrecy that serves a defense and intelligence community that is pursuing god knows what.
>Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder.
Source on this?
>Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee.
What does independent committee mean to you? They are from entirely different branches of government. That's as independent as it gets.
The post you linked is from the Senate Armed Services committee which is not the legislative oversight for the NSA. Different people, different processes. Geriatric senators probably forgot we had troops in Nigeria because America has troops in untold dozens of countries. No one remembers the whole list.
If you think the Taliban is our biggest threat you should leave national security to the people who do it for a living.
This is the problem. I can't prove based on an objective source I can drop a link to, because it's all classified. That's literally the crux of the problem. When someone says 'trust us, we have all this evidence, but we can't let you see any of it because it's a secret,' does your skepticism not trigger in the least bit?
I can say that there are only 11 judges listed as being on the FISA court, and I don't believe that 11 people can personally oversee every instance of the NSA conducting surveillance on all potential Americans of interest around the planet. Maybe they can. Who knows, it's classified.
Congress is a different branch than the presidency, doesn't mean Mitch McConnell is an independent check-and-balance on the authority of the president.
It's literally their job to be aware of that. They have a staff whose entire job it is to keep them aware of that. If they can't keep track, what's the difference between them and the congressional committee that's supposed to be keeping tabs on the NSA?
The people who do national security for a living are in a bubble that facilitates the construction of boogeymen. And if they can't give me any credible evidence as to the existence of said boogeymen without saying 'sorry, that's all classified,' then why should I believe otherwise?
Right now I'm supposed to be scared of China, but I personally see no evidence that I should be more worried about them than my own president who covered-up the threat from Coronavirus in February, and then tried to blame it all on the Chinese as a diversion. Looks to me like the Chinese were actually trying to warn us in February, while the President was trying to cover it up:
If the Taliban aren't a threat to U.S. national security, then why was the longest war in American history fought on Afghan soil? Isn't that where all those 9/11 hijackers were from, and the country that bankrolled them? If they weren't from Afghanistan why didn't we sanction or invade the country they were actually from, and that gladly bankrolled the operation? Is that classified too?
They don't need a court order to sniff packets and do bulk collection. All that data goes into huge data centers. If they want to query that collected data for an American's information, they get a warrant. No human looks at an American's data before getting a warrant. You'd do well to familiarize yourself with their process, which is highly publicized.
Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides.
>Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive.
Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you.
>So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China?
What are you talking about?
>very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive
You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
> several U.S. services work without a VPN
Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network.
> I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.