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"Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement". Sent from my Xiaomi, let's see if it works.

Anyway, I always thought if I have to use American phone backdoored by FBI or Chinese phone backdoored by China, I choose Chinese because they really cannot arrest me, unlike FBI.



Well, if you have anything on your Chinese phone (assuming it dead leak/back door back to China) that could get you arrested by the FBI - then whoever in China who had that ability to use it could then blackmail you with threats of arrest by the FBI if they told them, and you’d be in even worse shape right?

Especially since then they’d probably have you do things that would result in even more jail time if caught than the original thing. And since your data is transiting international borders all the time, it would make a nice juicy target for the NSA as well!


The scan is not for English words. Extract from table 14.... =================================================== No.: Original - Approximate translation 1 "宗教虔信者阵线", “Front of religious believers”, ... 22 "西藏自由", “Free Tibet”, ... 60 "蒙古独立", “Independence of Mongolia”, 61 "89民运", “89 Democracy Movement”, 62 "基督灵恩布道团", “Christian charismatic mission”, ... 145 "伊斯兰联盟", “Islamic League”, ... 201 "民运", “Democratic Movement”, 202 "妇女委员会", “Women’s Committee”, 203 "伊斯兰马格里布基地组织", “Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb”, 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”, 205 "巴勒斯坦解放组织", “The Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine”,


Sent from my Xiaomi device:

No.: Original - Approximate translation 1 "宗教虔信者阵线", “Front of religious believers”, ... 22 "西藏自由", “Free Tibet”, ... 60 "蒙古独立", “Independence of Mongolia”, 61 "89民运", “89 Democracy Movement”, 62 "基督灵恩布道团", “Christian charismatic mission”, ... 145 "伊斯兰联盟", “Islamic League”, ... 201 "民运", “Democratic Movement”, 202 "妇女委员会", “Women’s Committee”, 203 "伊斯兰马格里布基地组织", “Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb”, 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”, 205 "巴勒斯坦解放组织", “The Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine”,

Let's see


Are you in mainland China? Because the article clearly states that this functionality is disabled in phones manufactured for export to the West.

Edit to add: page 24 of the linked PDF, for reference.


but can be remotely reenabled at any time:

The capability in Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the "European Union region", but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry's National Cyber Security Centre said in the report.


Except your phone is not backdoored by the FBI.


It is backdoored by : Pegasus, NSA, CIA, 14 Eyes


There is a difference between having the potential of access versus actually having software installed that scans keywords to phone home about.

Wasn't everyone just outraged about apples csam because it could have the potential for intel agencies, like china's to abuse it by claiming political photos were csam?


Blocking something != phone home. This is about censorship, not spying. This is no better or worse than DNS filtering.

Besides, it is blocking on things like Al-Qaeda too. It's not some list of Freedom words.


Yes, that's right, I have 17 backdoors on my phone. And whatever China is doing is all happening on my phone, except from the 17 actors you've listed.


Five Eyes Burgers & Spies


So that’s why they’re “going out of business”


backdoored by FBI : Which phone is that?


Any phone turned on and used inside the US. Of course the FBI might have to do some paperwork to get the data from the NSA, but not really.


So you claim that NSA has access to all phone data without any paperwork nowadays?


What can you send from your phone that will get you arrested by the FBI, vs what can get you arrested by Chinese forces? Is this a valid comparison?


ECHELON!

More seriously no platform is trustworthy unless it’s airgapped these days.


Or 100% (hardware, firmware, software) Open Source.


Still not addressing the critique. We banalize authoritarianism by putting things at the same level, when they should not be.


Nice try!


You could always link some news article on the FBI abuses.

But you also have a gmail address, so I don't understand the reaction.


Having a gmail address is important to not stick out.

https://www.itstactical.com/intellicom/mindset/gray-man-stra...


If you don't use it for anything interesting, you're sticking out even more. A void can be as revealing.

If you're using it for something interesting, well, you're not sticking out in the "not having gmail" camp, but what's the point.


Yeah, you also need to subscribe to the Grey Service (tm), which simulates correspondence to your specifications. Tell them I didn’t send you and they will also throw in “for free”* a bug out bag disguised as an ordinary plastic shopping bag from a grocery store.

*Shipping and handling extra, depending on your jurisdiction a paper shopping bag may be substituted.


Interestingly, people have been trying to flee Lithuania for the US when the USSR was still around, and not the other way around.

I wonder if they might be skeptical of another communist regime starting to interfere with the country. Worked so well the last time...


Earlier this year Lithuania authorized Taiwan to open an embassy-type office, and the relationship with China has (as somewhat expected) gone downhill since then. This report sounds like the result of what you would expect any reasonable government to do in that case - investigate what influence or security weaknesses said country may have.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/22/china-lithuania-taiwan-...


In hindsight we know that red scare was as bad as the thing they were fighting against

As the Cold War intensified, the frenzy over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. became known as the Red Scare. The United States government responded by creating the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was charged with identifying Communist threats to the United States. HUAC often pressured witnesses to surrender names and other information that could lead to the apprehension of Communists and Communist sympathizers. Committee members branded witnesses as “red” if they refused to comply or hesitated in answering committee questions.

with the only exception that Americans could not flee from persecutions.


"As bad as" is doing a lot of glossing over things there. HUAC and McCarthyism were reprehensible. That doesn't mean they were equivalent to abuses that occurred in the Soviet Union.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Sovi...


> That doesn't mean they were equivalent to abuses that occurred in the Soviet Union

According to Americans, of course.

But according to large part of the rest of the World, it's wasn't different and it might even have been much worse.

Ask Nicaragua or Chile or, more recently, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoners.

USSR didn't finance fascist bomb attacks that killed hundreds of innocent people in my country, but CIA did.

Truth is "they were fleeing from USSR to USA because USA is a much better place" is actually a belief bias.


Well, those are not the comparisons that were being made that I was responding to.


?

Lithuania has been capitalist for 20+ years and quality of life has increased by a lot ever since.

the three baltic states are frontrunners in gov digitalization, for example


> Lithuania has been capitalist for 20+ years and quality of life has increased by a lot ever since.

That's what I said. Lithuania had it bad under communism (USSR). Maybe they are simply not interested in having an other communist regime (the CCP) meddle into it's internal affairs.


Ah yes, I agree completely with that


Lithuania's gov digitalisation is a bit of a farce. To use it - you need to login via your bank or couple of other supremely inconvenient forms of homegrown federated login systems, none of which offer a simple U2F. Then you get a form that 99% of time doesn't work on mobile. When you do fill it, actual government clark picks it, reviews it and 4 weeks later you get a response - "you need to come to the office to verify your identity".

Contrast it with NZ - I had to send my documents via post. In 6 years I NEVER had to visit ANY of government agency but I did receive visas and passports, just simply by post (if you have local drivers licence you do get to use local online services, which is a stupid barrier to begin with, but whatever).




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