Who'd You Rather Be Watched By: China, or the U.S.? [View all]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/whod-you-rather-be-watched-by-china-or-the-us/276898/



The Chinese and U.S. approaches to surveillance and how each of their security apparatuses go about organizing and carrying out such activities are fundamentally different in nature. It might be useful to label them into two distinct models: the U.S. approach can be described as the democratic security state model and the Chinese version is the authoritarian surveillance state model.


There are at least three critical areas to compare these two models:

• Checks and Balances: In the democratic security model, the security apparatus (NSA, FBI, police etc) is subject to legislative and legal oversight -- and occasionally media reporting -- that provides for some measure of accountability. This is largely missing in the authoritarian surveillance model.

• What Constitutes a Threat: While the definitions of threats by governments are constantly evolving, ingeneral the authorities in the democratic security model take a targeted approach and focus on specific threats, of which terrorism and foreign espionage are some of the high priority areas at present. The authoritarian surveillance model takes an expansive catch-all view of what constitutes a threat that covers anything the authorities deem to challenge their authority.