No such comparison was being made. The issue is whether or not the US or Chinese government affect our lives more, and since there's no danger of China trying to invade the US anytime soon, it's obviously the former. The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.

I had no such intention, I had hoped I made that clear. China is a terrible dictatorship, and the US, for all its faults, is a democracy with a mostly working justice system.

However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.

What mechanisms do you recommend for reining in, say, the NSA or GHCQ? Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks, or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?

I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay. With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:

- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit

- the country you live in

I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me, but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence, I am an extremely uninteresting target for them. If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space. A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.

But there are very little chance that China cares about you, whereas your local intelligence agency may have a much more direct impact on you.

> but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them

If we learned anything from the last half-century, it's that this predicate is just comically wrong.

> I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China.

Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.

> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.

There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.

Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.

Assuming you ever find out. I don't doubt Western governments have the ability to spy on their citizens as needed, and it's likely at some point most of us have been spied on in some minor way, but unless we happened to be doing something particularly nefarious at the point it happened, very unlikely they'd bother acting on it*. Whereas I very much doubt China could see much advantage in trying to spy on an average citizen from another country at all.

* unless perhaps you were applying for military clearance

> You can bring your own government to account for what it does

Our government is so powerful, you can't even make a dent.

By the same logic, the chinese government can't do anything to you, but your own government can arrest you, persecute you, execute you, etc. You'd have to be insane to prefer to be spied on by your own government rather than china.

Ok please tell me how me personally worrying about that will protect said infrastructure in any way.

Nokia was sold to Microsoft, then they sold it to HMD Global Oy /FoxConn and now they make most of their goods in China, almost to the point of being white labelled. Ericsson is a small company compared to what it once was. Sure, technically European (again) but a shell of their former selves.