It might be just my personal prejudice but I'm a little scared of China; mainly because of the fact that its own citizens don't enjoy freedom of expression, God knows what might happen to a foreign national.
You can say just about anything as long as you never question the ultimate ruling authority of the Communist Party of China.
As long as you aren't going around encouraging subversion, you're fine. And the internet police won't care that you are VPN'ing your traffic, they only care about locals and those that are actively spreading subversion.
So yes, it is a situation of "as long as you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear."
This is exactly my experience as well. I'm interested in hacking and making money - I have no interest in mucking about with a few hot-button political issues that, frankly, aren't any of my business. So, easily-circumvented firewall aside, nothing that they do really affects me.
How can you say this when the Bush administration has just spent the past 8 years systematically dismantling your privacy rights and running a global kidnapping and torture network?
Meanwhile, the US imprisons more of its population than any other nation on earth, especially for non-violent crimes. It doesn't scare you that you can be thrown in jail for years because you like to smoke a little weed?
I think what you meant to say is "I'm afraid of Chinese people/China and I haven't really put much thought into this." Why don't you go there before you start getting afraid of it. Do you even own a passport?
>How can you say this when the Bush administration has just spent the past 8 years systematically dismantling your privacy rights and running a global kidnapping and torture network?
Because he knows the difference between the current value and the derivative?
Besides, Obama has pretty much signed onto everything, so it's all good.
"Besides, Obama has pretty much signed onto everything, so it's all good."
No, it's more than that. When they actually investigate things, it turns out they weren't as bad as painted; for instance, it turns out that Guantanamo meets all relevant Geneva conventions after all, according to the Obama administration, and I'm citing this as an example not the complete list of what I've been seeing go by lately.
There's many people here who will never necessarily like Bush, but the sooner everyone realizes that the media ran a massive disinformation campaign on him and that the Bush accusations and the Obama bootlicking in the media on the exact same policies can't both be right (and that the truth is probably in the middle), the better off our democracy will be.
Wait a minute! Media disinformation campaign? So you are saying that there never existed a camp in Guantanamo Bay where the prisoners waited eight years without right to trial, placed in Cuba to avoid U.S. constitutional law? I've never used the word Nazi in an argument, so I won't start now, but it's really difficult.
If you actually examine the legal issues in depth, it's way more complicated and nuanced that what you imply; that simplifies the problem to the point of falsehood. Something that the Obama administration has actually flat-out said (or "admitted", if you prefer), albeit not to anywhere near the media blitz of the accusations, when they said they need a year to look at the issues involved with closure, because it's not a simple, obvious problem after all.
As a for instance... why would "avoiding US constitutional law" matter when it doesn't cover the detainees anyhow, as the Constitution only really covers citizens? You might be able to spin an argument about penumbric emanations or build an ethical argument of some kind out of that, but you certainly aren't going to get a straightforward argument out of the actual text of the constitution. There's been a lot of very careless assumptions about what the US Constitution and the Geneva convention contain tossed around on this issue, and on the whole I've found the debate almost entirely disconnected from reality in these past years.
You are free to "not like it" or think it is immoral, but its actual illegality is way murkier than the disinformation campaign has conveyed, to the point that it may not be actually illegal at all. Moreover, the moral and ethical issues haven't gotten a fair hearing either as the conditions have been routinely grossly misrepresented, to the point that almost universally when somebody actually goes there and visits it they expressed surprised at the way it really was. I totally believe that there are those who would consider the reality immoral or unpleasant, but very few people are actually operating off of a realistic view of the problem.
The real takeaway is that the situation is complicated, and when somebody says "the situation is complicated" and you have a hard time resisting calling that person a Nazi... hello! Wake up! That's a sign you're running on propaganda, not rational thought.
As a for instance... why would "avoiding US constitutional law"
matter when it doesn't cover the detainees anyhow, as the
Constitution only really covers citizens?
This is dead wrong. The Constitution covers all residents of the United States. Even illegal aliens are entitled to constitutional protections thanks to the 14th Amendment, which specifically says that no state shall "...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." See the cases of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 369, 6 Sup. Ct. 1064. and Wong Wing v. U S, 163 U.S. 228 (1896) 163 U.S. 228.
Now, the U.S. argued under Bush (and perhaps is still arguing?) that the detainees at Guantanamo are neither citizens nor are they within the territory United States. But I think this theory is far from completely decided. Arguing that Guantanamo is somehow not part of the territory of the United States, when clearly we exert our sovereignty there takes a special sort of blind sightedness. Furthermore, after Guantanamo is closed, if the detainees are brought onto US soil, then the Constitution will unquestionably apply to them.
Getting back to my original point: saying that the Constitution only applies to citizens likewise ignores nuance and simplifies the problem to the point of falsehood.
If you murdered someone, that would be a simple act; the legal process, though, would be complicated. I'm sure there are aspects of the legal process in terms of repatriating the inmates, for example, that are complicated. What is not complicated is the violation of human rights they suffered.
I apologize for the "Nazi thing". I lost my temper; I'm sorry. But that brings up an interesting point: the holocaust was legal. Some did "not like it," but it was legal. So in 1948, the entire world came up with a set of guidelines called the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that gave everyone -- Jews, Blacks, Muslims, everyone -- basic rights, regardless of what a country currently wants to make legal to "expedite its security".
You talk about propaganda, so let's talk about facts that no one disputes: More than 90% of the inmates in Guantanamo Bay were sold into captivity, most were never even charged with any crime let alone given a trial, and they were tortured. For eight years. Don't you see? If that's legal in any way, it can't be. The minute we make an exception for a dark-skinned Afghani, we send ourselves back to the time when exceptions were made for Jews and Gypsies, and we undo all the good work that was accomplished in the shadow of our shame.
And I'm pretty sure that the U.S. has signed a treaty (treaties?) making torture illegal, so the administration's behavior is illegal in addition to being immoral. The Bush administration gave absurd definitions of torture to try to classify the torture they were engaged in as not-torture, but I do not think anyone outside of the Bush administration, or knee-jerk partisans, take their definitions seriously.
I think the vast majority of Americans didn't notice any restriction on what they want to do in the 8 years of the Bush administration. The biggest impact for most was probably added hassle when flying or opening a bank account, but even that seems minimal in retrospect. If there'd been a terrorist attack or two every year, it might have gotten much worse, but it turns out that there are, to a first approximation, no terrorists who have the ability and desire to attack US soil.
What's your experience? Are my fears unfounded?