On Giving the Chinese Big Brother Good Toilet Reading for the Next 5 Years

First of all, a big congratulations to the Olympic committee for sending the games to a country ruled by totalitarians that have defined almost any type of dissent and free speech as “harmful to the social good.” 1,500,000 people (equivilant to the entire population of Philadelphia) were forced out of their homes to allow the Chinese government to show off on the world stage with its grand Olympic building programs (does it remind you of the German Olympics in the 1930′s?). Protests must be submitted for approval to the government with a 5 day notice, and are only allowed in three sectors nowhere near the games.

But what is truly funny is the understated embarrassment of notifying the visitors (and by visitors, I mean the cream-of-the-crop of the world community: world leaders, top athletes, celebrities, the wealthy and successful) that, due to where the Olympic committee decided to host their games, any electronic communication you use is probably being intercepted and read by the Chinese government.

The whole point of this warning is to keep people from unknowingly sharing their personal lives, business secrets, trade information, and every other crucial and secret tidbit that flows through the wires every day out of Big Brother’s hands. But what, exactly, is the point?

Let’s think about this: How many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of world leaders, business people, and other important people with important (and confidential) email stepped blearily off of halfway-around-the-world flights to plop down at their hotel room, link into the WiFi network, and <Ping!> <Ping!> automatically download the last 24 hours of backlogged email to their Outlook, Mac Mail, Blackberry or iPhone? Do you think the entire visiting community made sure to turn auto-fetch off on their devices before traveling to China? Haha, right. Regardless, with Outlook and Mac’s Mail program you can’t even view the subject lines or From fields of emails without pulling the whole message down.

Therefore, we would like to wish “Happy Reading!” to the comrades. If you need any help indexing the data, just ask Google. They don’t mind censoring the Internet to serve your human-rights busting regime, so they should be able to help you with this.