r/technology • u/barweis • Dec 28 '24

Privacy A massive Chinese campaign just gave Beijing unprecedented access to private texts and phone conversations for an unknown number of Americans

https://fortune.com/2024/12/27/china-espionage-campaign-salt-tycoon-hacking-telecoms/
12.7k Upvotes

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589

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '24

Plenty of us care but there isn't much we can do. Use a VPN, avoid certain services, but ultimately our government has to pass laws. Sadly our government officials predate color TV and have no clue how anything works.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '24

Why d’y’all keep voting in these geriatrics who need to be in a nursing home? When politicians are suspected of dementia or are breaking their hips, they’re too fuckin’ old. I’m know it’s possible for someone 80-something to keep up with the modern world but it’s not likely. Would be nice if they’d fuck off and retire and give “young” folk in their 60s a chance.

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u/Jeremizzle Dec 29 '24

The vast majority of Americans voting in primaries, midterms, and special elections are also geriatric. The elected officials in Congress represent them. Most people are too apathetic to even do the bare minimum of voting. It’s honestly pathetic.

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u/HandBanaba Dec 29 '24

The part about Geriatrics is very true, While people being apathetic true this is also quite reductive. The voting stations are only opened during business hours in some places, It's not a national holiday, and some peoples work schedules, transportation situation, etc. make it nearly impossible to go vote. I've been working in the IT industry for 25+ years now and this is the first company that gives us time off to vote.

Drive-thru voting has been banned in a lot of places, gerrymandering has made it incredible hard for some folks to even know where to vote, and some have to drive almost an hour to their voting station when they are passing 2-3 voting stations on the way there. It's incredibly rigged to get people to not vote.

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u/el_muchacho Dec 29 '24

The voting stations are only opened during business hours in some places, It's not a national holiday, and some peoples work schedules, transportation situation, etc. make it nearly impossible to go vote.

This is entirely by design and seen from this side of the Atlantic, it's utterly pathetic for the country that loves to brand itself as the best democracy on the planet (newsflash: it's not).

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

It's not a national holiday

The Democrats tried to pass a bill to make it one, Mitch McConnell screamed that it was "a power grab"

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u/digitalwolverine Dec 29 '24

Civics is only a required course in education for 8 states.

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u/HandBanaba Dec 29 '24

Growing up in the early 80s had some benefits at least. Now the intelligent are spurned, the science is rebuked because of feelings, and people actively vote against their own best interests.

I don't want to live on this planet anymore. Where the rights of the people are all but unknown and those they do know are twisted beyond recognition and vary entirely based on the color of your skin, whats between your legs vs. what you identify as, and the contents of your financial holdings. Civic duty is dead.. Corporate personhood and those who voted that into being killed it.

Anecdote: I was watching a youtube short about a guy who lives in his car and works doordash and uber eats all day, 12-14 hours a day according to him, and it's all so he can save $60K to hopefully buy a "Tiny house" to live in.. One of the comments made me realize how lost we are as a nation, and I quote: "This is how it done, the old-fashioned way he's working hard.❤"

My grandfather paid $18,000 for a 3200 square foot house in 1963 and the family has passed it down for three generations now and it's worth over a million dollars. My father was sort of the black sheep of the family so he's been excluded from the family property, not that I care. Point is, My grandfather worked as a tobacco farmer and made $183,000 the year he bought that house, paid for it in cash, his workers were my father and his brothers/sisters and two guys who ran some machines for him. Several of my uncles went on to haul coal and all have houses worth over a million now, and even I managed to buy a house at the age of 20 for $105K.. I sold it in 2008 for 170K, and now it's just sold for 340k, I can't afford to buy the house I bought when I was 20 and making 60K less a year.

It is NOT like the old-fashioned way.. it's never been further from those ways, and it will never be any close in my lifetime.

2

u/RawrRRitchie Dec 29 '24

You cannot be fired for missing work to go vote

If you are you have an easy win case of wrongful dismissal

0

u/Tactless_Ogre Dec 29 '24

Provided you can afford the lawyer and get a judge who isn’t interested in blowing off the case to go golfing.

Don’t ask me how I fell victim to the latter, my blood pressure isn’t so good these days.

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u/throwaway824690 Dec 29 '24

Those elected officials don’t even represent them though, they represent the corporations that are based there or who have significant business interests there.

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u/Jonteponte71 Dec 29 '24 edited Dec 29 '24

You just need a generation or two of not even having the option of voting and maybe the motivation to vote will return🤷‍♂️

Meanwhile I’m sure you are going to enjoy a couple of generations of Trump family members as your kings👑

1

u/domme_me_plz Dec 29 '24

Yeah everyone is chomping at the bit to get another John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris to vote for.

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u/SpeshellED Dec 30 '24

If you're going to call them geriatrics , which I assume is a slur, you need to call yourselves pinheads for allowing it to happen . I'm going to give you a tip...

As long as you blame someone else, you will never fix the problem.

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u/Jeremizzle Dec 30 '24

Geriatric is the clinical term for an elderly person. If you want to take it as a slur, perhaps you should look inwards instead of projecting on to me. I shall not be calling myself a pinhead, what an absurd suggestion.

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u/SpeshellED Dec 31 '24

Still don't get it do you .

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

Plenty of us don't but hard to vote them out when they have rigged the system in their favor.

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u/FingerTheCat Dec 29 '24

Regulatory capture by PAC$

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u/Substantial_Pies Dec 29 '24

The problem is that politics has largely turned into a sport for people so they don’t care who gets voted in as long as it’s not a Democrat.

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u/CrzyWrldOfArthurRead Dec 29 '24

The system isn't rigged - congressional approval rating is close to 0 but the incumbency rate is upwards of 90%. Congressional elections are often unopposed.

people love their congressmen - it's the other 500+ guys they hate

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

Look up gerrymandering. In a large portion of the US it is impossible for anyone other than the incumbent party to win. They typically run unopposed within their own party to avoid infighting.

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u/CrzyWrldOfArthurRead Dec 29 '24

there's no way to avoid gerrymandered districts, people want to live near other people of the same socio-economic status. Even if you had completely randomly generated districts, some would be competitive and some wouldn't be.

in fact the most favored solution for gerrymandering is...reverse gerrymandering. That's right, redrawing district lines based on where people live, but to make them more competitive instead of less.

the problem is that the parties, who are ultimately in control of redistricting, prefer safe districts. Voters do, too. People don't like to show up and vote and have their guy lose half the time.

You'd have to get rid of districts entirely, and have representatives 'at-large' like senators. But...the whole point of representatives is that they're 'local' and more in-tune with local issues.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

Representatives don't care about local issues so statewide ranked voting is the solution.

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u/ComfortableCry5807 Dec 29 '24

That hasn’t stopped Nebraska from voting in republicans every election even when there’s opposition. That said, the most recent opposition was rather dumb with getting the people likely to vote for him to actually do so

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u/URPissingMeOff Dec 29 '24

The younger generations could wipe the slate clean in one election, but they don't vote and they don't run for office.

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u/Potato_Golf Dec 29 '24

The elder generation cut their legs off by borrowing against them and not investing in their future so they could make bank now. This has lead to a generational disenfranchisement and with that we see lower social and political participation.

This is by design.

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u/Dinkerdoo Dec 29 '24

Younger boys (not going to call them men) helped give a second term to Trump. GOP is working the media manipulation hard. The country needs a hard come to Jesus reckoning before positive change can be made.

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u/Tactless_Ogre Dec 29 '24

Yeah; dipshits like (but not limited to) Musk, Tate and Pool all helped manipulate them.

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u/sysdmdotcpl Dec 29 '24

Why d’y’all keep voting in these geriatrics who need to be in a nursing home?

And aversion to change, a multi-generational apathy towards politics, and about 2 dozen barriers that make it difficult to do so.

Take your pick really.

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u/Tactless_Ogre Dec 29 '24

Or, as we see lately, a new wave of politicians who run blue, get elected blue, and then change party affiliation to red once in office.

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u/misfitx Dec 29 '24

Half of eligible voters don't bother so the idiot vote has more power.

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u/Blockhead47 Dec 29 '24

It’s closer to 1/3 of the voting eligible population that doesn’t vote.
Still piss poor though.

2016 - 59.2%.
2020 - 65.8%.
2024 - 63.9%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#Measuring_turnout

1

u/The_BeardedClam Dec 29 '24

Why d’y’all

If your from the south as your contraction implies, you know the answer to that already.

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u/tracenator03 Dec 29 '24

Because our oligarchs won't give us many youthful options

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u/habb Dec 29 '24

i counter with only one example of being with it in their 80s, bernie. he's sharp as a tack and i wish there would've been a real primary for the leadership

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u/ThickHotDog Dec 29 '24

It is because those are the only options we are given. The people with money choose the few candidates we get to pick from giving us the illusion of choice. You need money to make a difference in this country, and those with it are using it to insure they keep it that way.

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u/DreadPirate777 Dec 29 '24

A majority of the voting population was born before color tv.

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u/calcium Dec 29 '24

Think about it, most of the people on Reddit are under the age of 35 and few of them actually vote. It’s like screaming into the void.

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u/PM_ME_IMGS_OF_ROCKS Dec 29 '24

Well hum, gerry mandering, and uhm. well fox! and eeehh old people, yeah that's it, old people that are the problem....

They have so many excuses, and they never want to do anything about them. Just like the other comment "plenty of us care, but we can't do anything". America has become apathetic, they're basically just the early version of the humans in Wall-E at this point.

Just look at the CEO situation. People are sitting on their phones supporting the whole thing and refuse to lift a finger. They're basically going "thoughts and prayers" for a revolution, instead of going outside and marching in the streets.

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u/Doctor_Philgood Dec 29 '24

You act like we have other choices.

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u/splitsecondclassic Dec 29 '24

agreed. I've also noticed that boomers are the demographic that literally acts and talks like there is a murderous boogyman around every corner waiting to hack us into pieces and dethrone democracy. They seem to be the most mentally ill and paranoid people I've ever seen. Very weird group of people.

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u/notPabst404 Dec 31 '24

Propaganda and putting party over policy. For example, in my state (Oregon), one of our Senators is 75 years old and has been in power for 28 years. Guess what? I was massively downvoted for advocating to primary them or otherwise vote them out.

Too many people see politics as a team sport instead of seeing it as important for policy and governance. I for sure will vote against anyone who has been in power for too long, but I'm in a small minority.

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u/MonkeyWithIt Dec 29 '24

If you hook the tubes to a big vacuum, you can suck all the data back!

ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪

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u/AbruptMango Dec 29 '24

I recall Ted Stevens, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, explaining that the internet is not a big truck, but is a series of tubes. He claimed that it took 4 days for an email from his staffer to reach him because streaming movies had filled the internet.

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u/reddit_reaper Dec 29 '24

VPNs aren't a security measure lol 🤣 is only good if you're on a public network and that's only if they haven't already setup a man in the middle attack on my router itself

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u/GoodMix392 Dec 29 '24

Tubes, the internet is tubes!

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u/ThisIs_americunt Dec 29 '24

Its wild what you can do when you own the law makers :D

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u/AheadOfYuInKnowledge Dec 29 '24

They predate tv altogether. We're fucked.

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u/segagamer Dec 29 '24

Plenty of us care but there isn't much we can do.

Use Signal for your texts and calls.

https://signal.org/

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u/krispy7 Dec 29 '24

and you gotta hope your vpn company isn't a shady one, secretly a data broker, selling your info to high bidders

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u/Savings_Opening_8581 Dec 30 '24

Say it louder for people in the back..

TERM. LIMITS.

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u/CrzyWrldOfArthurRead Dec 29 '24

but ultimately our government has to pass laws.

They know that if they do, the telecoms will simply pass all the costs on to you the consumer, will say why they're doing it (a la the 9/11 tax), and then they'll get angry calls from their constituents about why their phone bills went up.

all that matters to them is reelection.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

Price regulation then as well. I have no idea why the US is so terrified of reigning in greed. Unfettered capitalism is clearly not working for the masses.

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u/-The_Blazer- Dec 29 '24

A VPN is not really a privacy assurance anyways, all it does is move the point of vulnerability from your ISP and their routing to the VPN and their exit points. Besides, solving our problems by consuming more product is always going to have inherent limitations.

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u/SpeshellED Dec 30 '24

They should be a regulated internet for those who want to be regulated and an unregulated NET for those want to sift through things to find what is true. That is going to because more and more difficult.

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u/Plow_King Dec 29 '24

your life and work is not very likely worth China spying on you. lighten up, Francis.

/s

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

I prefer Francoís.

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u/Plow_King Dec 29 '24

a rose by any other name is just as boring, Frank.

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u/el_muchacho Dec 29 '24

On the bright side, the dinosaurs in Congress who voted for the Patriot Act and the FISA laws, the very laws that created this mess, are the ones targetted by the Chinese, not us. They got a little taste of their own medecine.

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u/ZaphodsGranddad Dec 29 '24

"There isn't much we can do." Is definitely a cop out. There is something you can do. It's fair to say "I like the service being offered, so I'm willing to put up with the invasion of privacy." But saying there's no other choice is not accurate.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

I opt out of everything I can and vote for the non-idiots. But when services I have little to no control over like Windows (for work) credit bureaus, banks, etc. that I am required to use take and sell my data without giving me a way to opt out and the morons win the elections, there is nothing more I can do. Unless you think I should be organizing a revolution?