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Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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This is one of the reasons the US is looking to restrict Chinese EV imports. And to be clear, they’re so cheap because the CCP is subsidizing the entire Chinese EV industry, since they want to entirely own the market. But that’s not all.
China, as you may know, has a lot of serious problems around privacy and surveillance. More pointedly: it’s a surveillance state. It’s entirely possible that Chinese EVs could be sending back tons of data to servers in China. That data could be related to users and passengers… but it could also be area surveillance and data gathering (i.e. effectively employing multiple cars in a particular area as a distributed integrated sensor system), because modern cars have a shitload of cameras and microphones in them these days. I would be extremely unsurprised if the CCP was leveraging EV data gathering as an intelligence source. Think about it: they could give/sell near-realtime information to anyone they feel like. The CCP themselves is interested, I’m sure, in what’s going on in Taipei right now. They might sell South Korean data to North Korea. They might sell Ukrainian or Moldovan or Latvian or Finnish data to Russia. Those states might then turn around and use that data to try to destabilize the specified target countries, or even to assist with an invasion.
There are a LOT of reasons why letting the CCP own a vast majority of global EV production is a bad idea.
Remember when the Patriot Act was a thing?
Surveillance of your citizens isn't a CCP only thing.
Yeah. I know. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about this.
Whataboutism isn’t going to change what I said, or how accurate what I said is.
It's not whataboutism, it's hypocrisy.
It’s really not, and it’s also not really apples to apples.
The Patriot Act, and the level of surveillance it enabled and continues to enable, is absolutely bad, and I am absolutely not defending it.
But the CCP comprehensively surveils its citizenry in ways that would appall people born and raised in the west - think “you were having a bad day last week and you yelled at a rude store clerk, and a camera caught that and flagged it for a party official to review, so now your metro card won’t take you anywhere besides work and home”. That’s a level of granular surveillance and control that’s commonplace in China, and would be absolutely unheard of in a non-authoritarian state.
To get back to the main points I am expressing here:
Thus, it stands to reason that the CCP, which is footing the bill for a meaningful percentage of their auto industry’s EV development costs, could very plausibly make “throw tons of sensors in there and pipe the data to us” a condition of that assistance.
That example you gave about yelling at a store clerk led to a man being murdered by the police in America (George Floyd).