Congress Should Act Against Google-China Deal.

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Author: Lipscomb, Thomas thomas.lipscomb@gamail.com

Last month America's second largest technology company, Google, announced a program that would assist Communist China's ongoing attempt to control the minds of its more than 1.3 billion people, Simply put, Google will help make sure that when anyone in China looks up Tiananmen Square on the Chinese version of Google that person will never see the famous picture of a student facing a Chinese Army tank.

Google is perverting its own wonderful market-leading search technology that opens up the resources of the entire Internet to everyone into becoming the world's most efficient censorship machine. And it is doing this so it can get even richer by gaining access to the fastest-growing internet marketplace in the world, China is now second with more than 100 million users and will soon to surpass the U.S.

In spite of Google's aging hippie rhetoric on its website about "Do No Evil," there can't be anything much more evil than helping a totalitarian regime that once brainwashed U.S. POW's during the Korean War to brainwash its own citizens more efficiently. Political analyst Ralph Peters puts it perfectly: "Forget all the new-age-has-dawned rhetoric. Google agreed to turn the information superhighway into a prison corridor (while posturing about freedom of information back home in the USA). Google hasn't simply betrayed American interests--its executives have betrayed the aspirations of a billion Chinese, reducing them to just more digits in Google's digital universe."

For many years, the State Department, in coordination with the Department of Defense, has been clearing or denying exports of hi-tech hardware or software that might have "dual-use" capabilities that could threaten U.S. security. Normally this is applied to products with military applications, but one of the problems with it has always been the wide range of discretion the government has in exercising its powers, making its decisions unpredictable. Today the responsibility for reviewing the kind of arrangement Google and China are planning has moved to the Bureau of Industry and Security of the Department of Commerce.

According to a blandly oblivious bureaucrat at BIS Commerce: "Internet filtering technologies are ubiquitous and are generally not subject to export controls. "We are not aware of any U.S. government regulatory review requirements with respect to this transaction,"

Since those export controls were originally imposed back in smokestack America, The U.S. economy changed from an industrial economy to an information economy. Today more than half of America's GDP comes from information technology and information products. Not surprisingly, the federal government is often the last to understand changes like this. It can be hard to see that today's world information technology might be more dangerous than military equipment.

But can anyone at Commerce say that an American company's helping poison the minds of the largest nation on earth is any more defensible than had an American chemical company sold the formula for the infamous Zyklon D gas used at Auschwitz that helped Nazi Germany "control political dissidents" by poisoning their bodies?

In his State of the Union message, the President said, "We seek the end of tyranny in the world." And he reminded the world that had America merely stood by while the Soviet Empire suppressed millions of those in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe we would have been "complicit in the oppression of others."

If the Bush Administration and GOP-led Congress continue to do nothing in the face of open defiance by American high tech companies such as Google who wish to sell the new tools of oppression to authoritarian governments, there is no doubt that they will be "complicit in the oppression of others" as well.

The Bush Administration should immediately ask for an ongoing review of Google's or any other American high technology company's exports that in its opinion may threaten U.S. national security by adding a useful tool for oppression to the arsenal of the tyrannies we say we oppose, If it fails to, Congress should remember the Jackson-Vanik Act that it passed that did so much to help liberate the former Soviet Union.

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By Thomas Lipscomb

Mr. Lipscomb is a veteran journalist. thomas.lipscomb@gamail.com.