Chinese Lies – Followup

In a followup, of sorts, to my original post of outrage at the IOC and China’s ignorance/deceit/lies, I found two posts (via Valleywag) by someone who is a “privacy consultant” and digs up dirt for a living on people.

And he just happened to have investigated the “Chinese Gymnast Incident” for kicks and giggles.  Check out the original post, and his second foray into it.

In a nutshell, he finds that everyone is right.  Official Chinese documents (a spreadsheet that was public, and then removed for what I’m sure were “innocent” reasons) point to one of the female gymnasts being 14 years old.  Which is definitely less than the requirement of 16.

I don’t want to seem like a broken record here, but there’s another glaring feature of China’s attempts to control reality:  after the investigator looked at the same results from within the Chinese Google, the results (and their cached versions) were quickly removed.

Google China has openly admitted that they filter results for the Great Firewall of China, but there had been no mention of limits, definitions, or reaction times.  The most disturbing part of all this is that Google bent to the Chinese will to help lie to the IOC and the rest of the free world… and did it in record breaking time.

My conclusion?  Google China has the Chinese government more in their pocket (or maybe “in their throats” would be a better description of the depth of control) than they want people to believe.

And that’s just complete bullshit.

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Update (8/20/2008 2:45pm PST):  As if all the lies and deceit weren’t enough… 5 U.S. bloggers have been detained by the Chinese government, for reporting on some Tibetan protests.  And no-one saw this coming, right?  *sarcastic/angry wink*  See full details on RW/W

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