Those Privacy-Hating Chinese Communist Tyrants

[Better Believe It]

Those privacy-hating Chinese communist tyrants
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
July 30, 2008

Associated Press, yesterday:

Foreign-owned hotels in China face the prospect of "severe retaliation" if they refuse to install government software that can spy on Internet use by hotel guests coming to watch the summer Olympic games, a U.S. lawmaker said Tuesday.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) was introducing a resolution in the Senate on Tuesday that urges China to reverse its actions.

That's the same Sen. Sam Brownback who voted last year to enact the Protect America Act, which "allow for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contain virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans' private communications up to this administration." And it's the same Sen. Brownback who also voted for this year's FISA Amendments Act, which empowers the U.S. Government to tap directly into the U.S. telecommunications systems in order to monitor international emails and telephone calls with no individual warrant required.

The idea that the U.S. can exert meaningful leverage on China's surveillance behavior is laughable for reasons wholly independent of what the U.S. Government itself does with regard to spying on its own citizens. Nonetheless, to watch U.S. Senators like Sam Brownback actually maintain a straight face while protesting China's warrantless spying on the email and telephone communications of foreigners, and lamenting that private companies feel unfairly pressured to cooperate with China's government spying out of fear of losing lucrative business opportunities, is so surreal that it's actually hard to believe one is seeing it. How many days do we have to wait before we get to read a righteous Fred Hiatt Editorial condemning China's Communist tyrants for their outrageous spying intrusions? Maybe Jay Rockefeller can co-sponsor Brownback's Senate Resolution condemning China's surveillance activities and demanding that they stop it at once.

Please read the entire article at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/30/china/index.html

[annabanana]

1. Perhaps.... just perhaps.. When our spoiled media gets a taste of

what "state interference" with a heavier hand is like, they will revisit their la di da attitude about interference from OUR maladministration...

[Deja Q]

2. Stop whining!

[bperci108]

3. Remember:

Edit to add: And to top it all off, this Brownback fuckwit is one of my senators. Jeebus.

[readmoreoften]

4. Seriously. The Chinese need to stop calling themselves Communists. They jumped the capitalist shark

a long time ago. They're now an anti-Democratic global capitalist nation. I'm sick of hearing rw'ers say "We going to end up like China" every time a progressive mentions universal single payer health care. :banghead: There's no name for what they are. Anti-democratic capitalists.