You and I, we're nobodies with no power. We share a country with people who do have power. The power they exercise impacts our lives. Those people have weaknesses. Those weaknesses can be exploited.
If you ran an intelligence service, you might want to identify targets, prioritize targets, and potentially create a graph of social connections.
Tiktok provides picture data (geolocation, timestamps, hashes, potentially facial recognition and OCR), location data, time data (hours app is opened), private message data, and data on hobbies/interests, I assume there is profile and private message data as well.
That's all without bringing up the glaring problem which is damaging institutional trust. Promoting anti-science videos or showing one group very pro videos and another group very against videos is damaging to our very social fabric. Amplifying things that feel intuitive but aren't correct is dangerous.
The threat model you perceive is that our authoritarian government would oppress us. The threat model that is happening is that external governments are causing chaos within our borders, amplifying division, and sewing distrust.
You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
> You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
> I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
Who has the motive and opportunity to do things that screw over regular folks? It's a lot easier to think of cases where the CIA has something to gain by keeping someone in or out of jail who shouldn't be, or routing money or weapons somewhere they shouldn't be, than where China does. Low-level disruption would be a poor use of their assets that's not worth the risk. CIA employees have a lot more reason to be in zero-sum competition with regular Joes.
I say this in good faith: I don't understand what you are trying to express.
Can you give concrete examples of who the CIA would want to jail or not? Why do CIA employees lose when regular Joes gain and regular Joes gain when CIA employees lose?
Who decides who should or shouldn't be sent weapons. How informed do you think you are compared to the people who make the orders to route money or send weapons?
I am not a CIA lover by an means. At best the CIA supports countries like Ukraine and Taiwan. At worst CIA plays "realpolitik" and puts American interests, particularly those of Americas upper class/aristocrats, first.
> Can you give concrete examples of who the CIA would want to jail or not? Why do CIA employees lose when regular Joes gain and regular Joes gain when CIA employees lose?
What I mean is they're a lot more likely to be entangled with everyday life. Just a lot more chance to get mixed up with a senator who can send more budget their way, or even a local sheriff who asked too many questions about the permitting for something they were building, or hell, one of the guys who bullied the agent at school. The amount of people who can meaningfully influence something a PRC agent cares about is likely to be smaller, just because there's so much more domestic politics than international politics.
If you ran an intelligence service, you might want to identify targets, prioritize targets, and potentially create a graph of social connections.
Tiktok provides picture data (geolocation, timestamps, hashes, potentially facial recognition and OCR), location data, time data (hours app is opened), private message data, and data on hobbies/interests, I assume there is profile and private message data as well.
That's all without bringing up the glaring problem which is damaging institutional trust. Promoting anti-science videos or showing one group very pro videos and another group very against videos is damaging to our very social fabric. Amplifying things that feel intuitive but aren't correct is dangerous.
The threat model you perceive is that our authoritarian government would oppress us. The threat model that is happening is that external governments are causing chaos within our borders, amplifying division, and sewing distrust.
You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.