As an European those double standards and American exceptionalism (the idea that common laws and rules do not apply to US) will never cease to bother and annoy me.
As an European those double standards and American exceptionalism (the idea that common laws and rules do not apply to US) will never cease to bother and annoy me.
You do know that Canada is not the US, and most Canadians do not identify or want to be seen as American.
In any case, the solution here is glaringly obvious. If you think that American companies pose a national security threat, or that they serve as unofficial tools of an adversarial government remove them from the country using legal means, just like Canada did.
That's what worries me, the easiness with which we label one as enemy, and assume the other one being normal.
The issue here is that TikTok was allowing its offices to act on behalf of the CCP in opposition to Canadian interests. If we discover Google is running anti Canadian CIA ops we would have an issue with that as well.
The difference is presumably that Canada is happy to have google collect data since google is happy to cooperate with CSIS.
How many people are forgetting those basics will never cease to surprise me.
Imagine believing there would be something as powerful as Tiktok and it wouldn't be used for propaganda purposes.
It is just boring agreeing with these morons at this point. Let them live in their dream world as they pretend to be smart. Sheep are easy to herd.
So, effectively, it seems like US voters have the same amount of influence on their intelligence services' spying, both domestic and international, than citizens of China do.
Long story short, "spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy" is definitely not something I agree with, at least not in the democractic setups we see in the west (and that includes Europe, to be clear).
I'm not defending what the US has done, but compromising elected officials in the House of Parliament is not 'peanuts' by any measure, and it is something that China has done, and the US hasn't.
I also have never said that what the US is doing is acceptable.
If Google opened offices that were a CIA front posing a national security risk, I would expect them to be shown the door as well. From what I understand, the reason Bytedance had their offices shut down was because they were acting as a front for the CCP.