The Mind of Alex

What to do when you want the littlest communication possible from part of your country? The TechGeist team’s love of the Iranian government is possibly only superseded by our dedication to the Chinese military junta single party. Well, brilliance thinks alike, and China stole a move from Teheran’s dance book and shut down Twitter and the general internet over in a “western province,” during heavy ethnic rioting.

Apparently China was afraid of picture uploads similar to those from the Tibet debacle. Small tip, China, if you are afraid of having people see what you are doing, you probably should not be doing it. At least in America when our government fails completely (Hurricane Katrina?) we all get to enjoy watching them at it. From the mouth of the source:

“One Twitter user posted what he said was an explanation of the Internet outage from the provincial branches of China Telecom and China Unicom. Service would remain down indefinitely to prevent growth of the riots, the message said.”

Now let’s play a small game, who do you think owns the telecom giants in China? China does! Shockingly enough, getting part of your own government to knuckle under and do what its source of paychecks says is probably little effort. This is a disturbing precedent, the shuttering of lines of communication to dodge the international eye. We must protest this. How can you proxy out when someone cut the cable?

“A little sunlight is the best disinfectant,” - Barack Obama