what a bunch of yahoos.

So there's this Chinese journalist who posted on a site called Democracy Forum about his government cracking down on democracy activists.

The Chinese authorities contacted Yahoo! (apparently, the journalist had used a Yahoo! address), and the guys over at the Yahoo datacenter couldn't drop to their knees fast enough to service the Chinese secret police. They turned over the journalist's "e-mail account, his computer address, his log-on history and the contents of several weeks of his e-mail."

The Chinese journalist, a fellow named Shi, was then arrested by Chinese authorities, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

That in itself is not red hot news (it happened over a year ago), but now it turns out that the Yahoo folks lied to Congress about their prior knowledge of the nature of the investigation.

Makes me feel less than enthusiastic about using any of the services offered by Yahoo, it does.

On a side note: you know what I find absolutely shameful? There are countries like China and Burma where people get jailed for decades, or shot outright, for demanding the right to a fair and proper vote...and our voter turnout hovers at just over 50% if you average every election since 1960. Austria has a 92% voter turnout on average, Germany sits at 86%, and even 76% of the UK's subjects get off the couch on Election Day.

(Makes you laugh about W talking about a "mandate", or the Libtards blabbing about how "Gore won the popular vote"...a little over half of the vote at 50% turnout means that a quarter of the voting-age population voted for you, which doesn't exactly mean you have half the nation in your corner, to put it carefully.)

Now, you can argue that the system is rigged, anyway--it certainly feels like every two years or so we're being presented with two platters full of steaming poop and then asked, "Which one would you like to eat?" However, the only thing that separates a citizen from a non-citizen in the civil rights department is the right to vote, and those who won't vote are no different from those who can't.