First of all, let me correct you- it is Congressman Chris Smith that has introduced the Internet freedom legislation, not Chris Cox as you repeatedly stated. Secondly, I am what you might call a flaming liberal, and I am also opposed to US government attempts to get Internet companies to hand over information about American citizens, but there is simply no moral equivalency between the situation in the U.S. and the situation in China. The government is primarily interested not in protecting its citizens from "harmful content" such as pornography but rather in maintaining its own hold on power. People have ready access to pornography, but if they try to access what we in the "West" would say is innocuous material about democracy or human rights, they can be instantly tracked, their computer frozen or even arrested. Yes, China is a sovereign nation, but without even getting into the nature of the regime in power, it has also signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which would seem to disallow it from carting of large numbers of journalists and "Internet dissidents" to jail simply for expressing their opinions or passing along information on the Internet.


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