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:

• the CCP is an authoritarian surveillance state
• companies in mainland China are forced, as a matter of policy, to give the CCP an extreme level of access to basically all of their data (incidentally, this is one of the main reasons the biotech company I work at bailed on China altogether in the last couple years, despite the huge patient demographics we could address there, because their surveillance laws directly collide with a ton of western medical privacy laws)
• the CCP is a geopolitical adversary to much of the west at this point, and is becoming more adversarial
• the CCP has an established pattern and practice of leveraging industrial espionage and reverse engineering to further their own national interests. There are numerous significant examples of this.

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.