Does this come as a suprise?
Didn’t the Olympic Committee see this coming?
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, a Republican, produced a translated version of a document from China’s Public Security Bureau that requires hotels to use the monitoring equipment.
“These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government,” Brownback said at a news conference.
Yes, that’s outrageous. The reaction would even be more justifiable had they paid attention all along to the obvious. Daily occurrences in China.
Protests and violence are increasing with the approach of the Olympics. In spite of closer monitoring on the part of the police, migrant workers and ordinary people are expressing their frustration and disappointment.
And paying a price for it, too.
Yesterday, two other people were arrested, in Yangzhou (Jiangsu) and Fuzhou (Fujian), for spreading rumors about a possible bombing attack. Arrests over nothing more than false information, in Yangzhou with the accusation of “spreading terrorist news”, is a symptom of the growing tension in the country, which is also demonstrated by the spread of violence and police reactions. In Qingdao, the police are trying to arrest the people who left five different telephone messages warning of risks of terrorist attacks. The population now confirms that the Olympics are taking place in an atmosphere of repression and persecution.
The “Olympic nightmare” continues for the organizers of the Beijing games and the Chinese government, which, in spite of all of its superficial declarations, must face new problems and allegations each day.
Problems brought on by their own repressive regime.
Security forces also attacked the groups of journalists present: reporters from Hong Kong were targeted in particular, and at the end of the day they denounced the arrests and violence. According to the South China Morning Post, a newspaper based in Hong Kong, a group of journalists was forcibly removed from the area set up for the media near the main Olympic ticket office. Felix Wang, a photographer for the SCMP, was arrested and detained for several hours, under the accusation of beating a policeman while he was trying to document the clashes between the crowd and the officers. He was released early yesterday afternoon; the directors of the newspaper call it “an unfortunate episode”, and are showing “solidarity with the wounded policeman”. Law Fai-cheung, a Hong Kong cable TV reporter, says that he was “grabbed by the neck and shoved” by the officers, who also destroyed his cameras. Other journalists denounce “violence and abuse” on the part of the authorities.
If only they had been paying this attention and applying this pressure all along.
